Biography

Samira Mirbagher Ajorpaz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University. She earned a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Isfahan in 2014 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Texas A&M University in 2019. In 2020, she was a University of California Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. She was named an MIT ECE Rising Star in 2021.

Her research spans computer architecture, computer systems security, and machine learning. She studies how microarchitectural behavior can reveal security-relevant information and how hardware can detect and defend against these risks. Her work includes pre-silicon security verification of advanced microarchitectures, microarchitectural side channels, adversarial machine-learning attacks on hardware, and security concerns arising from machine learning in hardware.

A central goal of her research is to make processors and accelerators more secure and energy-efficient. She develops approaches for detecting security risks early and explores ways to streamline machine-learning models for hardware, making them smaller, faster, and more efficient. Her recent work also explores generative AI techniques that allow hardware to adapt dynamically to security, performance, and energy demands.

Education

• Ph.D. 2019
  Computer Science
  Texas A&M University

Recent Publications