Lalita “Lali” Devadas joins the Albert Nerken School of Engineering this year as assistant professor of computer science (CS). She completed her Ph.D. in the Computer and Information Security group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) after earning an undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer science from Columbia University. While in graduate school, she also ran a theoretical computer science reading group for high school girls in the Boston area through the MIT PRIMES program.

Tell us about your research interests.

When I started my Ph.D., I worked on the problem of securely delegating computational tasks to an untrusted server, but from an entirely theoretical perspective. Over the course of my Ph.D. program, I realized that I was also interested in how the cryptographic protocols I was thinking about could be implemented and deployed. Currently I'm thinking about extending known protocols to the distributed setting, where many mutually distrusting parties in a network want to collectively delegate a task.

What brought you to The Cooper Union?

I knew I wanted to spend most of my time teaching, but I didn’t want to stop doing research. I was thrilled to learn about Cooper because it offered the opportunity to do both, in what I consider to be the best city in the world. I admired that Cooper has such a weight of history behind it, yet is constantly evolving, including the addition of the computer science department last year. I had already spent a lot of time thinking about the pedagogical question of how to teach computer science, and I was honored to join a department that was so new, where I could help build a curriculum.

What aspects of teaching are you most excited about in the coming academic year at The Cooper Union?

When I was in college, I loved the material I was learning in my computer science classes, but they also felt incredibly impersonal. Most were around 200 students and taught in a giant lecture hall, and I never had a direct interaction with the professor. I’m very happy to be teaching classes in the fall where I can get to know my students and learn about their interests. In ECE-455A: Cybersecurity, especially, I am looking forward to tailoring the curriculum to what students are excited about. Based on everything I’ve heard and seen about Cooper students, they are endlessly curious.