Roya Ensafi honored with U-M Henry Russel Award

Roya Ensafi, Morris Wellman Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, has been selected as a recipient of the Henry Russel Award, the university’s highest honor for faculty in the early to middle stages of their careers. Awarded to up to four individuals annually, the award recognizes faculty members with an outstanding record of achievement in both research and teaching.

Ensafi’s research focuses on internet security and privacy, networking, and measurement. She has worked diligently to develop scalable systems and techniques to protect online users from censorship, surveillance, and discrimination. The technologies she builds detect and defend against powerful actors and practices that threaten to hamper online users’ freedoms.

One of Ensafi’s main initiatives is Censored Planet, a platform that analyzes and tracks internet censorship practices in over 200 countries using state-of-the-art remote monitoring tools. She also spearheaded the development of VPNanalyzer, a tool that works across platforms to enable users to continuously monitor the security and privacy of commercial VPNs.

Her work on these and other topics has yielded dozens of publications in top conferences, including USENIX Security, the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), and many more. Ensafi has earned a number of prestigious awards in support of her research, including an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the USENIX Security Defense Prize, and others.

Considered a foremost expert on online security and privacy, Ensafi’s work has been cited in widely read publications including The New York Times, The Economist, Newsweek, Wired, and Ars Technica. In 2021, she was invited to speak on democracy-affirming technology at the White House as part of President Biden’s Summit for Democracy. 

Her contributions have been recognized at the university level as well. She was named a Morris Wellman Faculty Development Professor in 2022, and she was recently recognized by U-M Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) with the Willie Hobbs Moore Achievement Award for her contributions to promoting equity in STEM.

Ensafi first joined the CSE faculty in 2017. Before that, she was a research fellow in the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University and a visiting researcher in the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley. She completed her PhD in Computer Science at the University of New Mexico in 2014.