I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, at The University of British Columbia (UBC). In my research, I study how to design privacy-enhancing technologies that offer strong privacy-utility trade-offs.
I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo working with Prof. Florian Kerschbaum (Oct 2019 – Jul 2023). I received my PhD from the University of Vigo (Spain) under the supervision of Prof. Carmela Troncoso and Prof. Fernando Pérez-González.
Research interests
I am broadly interested in computer security and privacy problems. My research studies these problems from a statistical perspective, using theoretical tools to quantify the privacy leakage of different systems and design strong defenses. My research topics include, but are not limited to:
- Privacy-preserving searchable encryption.
- Privacy-preserving machine learning.
- Anonymous communication systems.
- Differential privacy.
Prospective students
I am looking for motivated students that want to do research on privacy-enhancing technologies, preferably in the research topics mentioned above. Please see the prospective students page for more information.
Update, Fall 2026: AI has made it very easy to broadcast emails to professors. It is getting harder and harder to tell if an email I get is a human interested in working with me, or an email sent by an agent. So I am almost never replying to prospective student emails anymore.
This year, I am looking for a student interested in the privacy analysis of searchable encryption protocols! This involves some applied crypto, some stats, some simulations of these systems, etc. Please take a look at related work on this (e.g., my SAP or IHOP papers). Not looking for someone in ML/AI privacy at this point.
Ultimately, if you want to work with me, please apply using UBC’s official applications, as that is the only way that I can hire students at the end of the day.