Christos Papadopoulos Joins Department as Sparks Family Chair of Excellence

Posted on 2020-09-08

Dr. Christos Papadopoulos was recently appointed and joined the UofM in August as the Sparks Family Chair of Excellence in the Department of Computer Science.

This chair of excellence, housed in the University’s Division of Research & Innovation, will provide flexibility to focused and/or interdisciplinary areas of research excellence to contribute toward the University’s strategic research goal of attaining and maintaining Carnegie R1 classification status. With this goal in mind, the position was assigned to Computer Science in July 2019.

Before joining the Computer Science Department at the UofM, Papadopoulos was an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and a professor at Colorado State University. His research interests include network and cyber-physical systems security, global internet measurements, information-centric networks and smart and autonomous systems.

From 2018-20, he was a program manager at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology directorate, where he managed projects on cyber-physical systems security, including industrial control systems, law enforcement and automotive cybersecurity.

“Dr. Papadopoulos has had an exceptional career in both academia and government,“ said Dr. Lan Wang, UofM professor and department chair in computer science. “His research vision in smart and autonomous systems is well-aligned with the department’s strategic vision. Most importantly, his experience in leading large multidisciplinary research grants will help the University pursue large-scale center grants such as NSF Engineering Research Center and DHS Center of Excellence.”

Dr. Abby Parrill, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences added, “We look forward to Dr. Papadopoulos serving as a catalyst for a dramatic expansion of our already excellent cybersecurity and autonomous systems research activities.”

Papadopoulos was involved in research projects in excess of $10 million and served as a principal investigator on projects funded by DHS, DARPA and the NSF. Recent projects address internet-wide security problems such as Distributed Denial of Service attacks and detecting evasive internet bots, analysis of global internet routing and applications of future internet architectures in scientific domains such as climate and high-energy physics through named data networking.

He is a senior IEEE member and has served on numerous ACM and IEEE conference program committees. Papadopoulos received his PhD in 1999 from Washington University in St. Louis, MO.