Office: 4305A Gilbert Place
Email: mdhicks2@vt.edu
Mailing address:
220 Gilbert St
Blacksburg, VA 24060
I am an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Virginia Tech. Previously, I was a member of the technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Before that, I was a Lecturer at the University of Michigan, where I taught courses on Security and Programming. Between 2013 and 2015, I was a Postdoc working with Todd Austin (Architecture) and Kevin Fu (Security) at the University of Michigan. In May of 2013, I earned a PhD in Computer Science (advised by Sam King, now at UC-Davis) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I also earned my Masters in 2008. I earned my BS in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida in May 2006.
Broadly, I am interested in systems, security, and architecture. My current research spans the security of hardware, hardware for increased software security, embedded system security, and intermittently computation. I am especially interested in how hardware changes over time and how it fails with respect to security. Previous research projects include, crafting and detecting malicious insertions into hardware and hardware support for real-time and embedded systems.