Rate My Professor Alvaro Cardenas

Alvaro A. Cárdenas serves as the Eugene McDermott Associate Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas, where he is also affiliated with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute as an adjunct professor. He earned his B.S. degree from Universidad de los Andes in Colombia and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park. Before joining UT Dallas, Cárdenas was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and a research staff member at Fujitsu Laboratories of America in Sunnyvale, California. At UT Dallas, he directs the Cyber-Physical Systems Security and Privacy Lab and focuses his research on securing cyber-physical systems, including critical infrastructures such as power grids, water distribution networks, and transportation systems. His work addresses detecting cyberattacks via physical system monitoring, mitigating stealthy attacks on industrial control systems, defending against IoT vulnerabilities, and preserving privacy in smart devices like thermostats.

Cárdenas has received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his cyber-physical systems security research, the 2018 Faculty Excellence in Research Award from the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, the Eugene McDermott Fellow Endowed Chair, and the Distinguished Service Award from the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy. Key publications include 'Attacks Against Process Control Systems: Risk Assessment, Detection, and Response' (ACM ASIACCS, 2011), 'Limiting the Impact of Stealthy Attacks on Industrial Control Systems' (ACM CCS, 2016), 'A Survey of Physics-Based Attack Detection in Cyber-Physical Systems' (ACM Computing Surveys, 2018), and 'Big Data Analytics for Security' (IEEE Security & Privacy, 2013). His contributions have advanced cybersecurity for critical infrastructure and influenced defenses against advanced persistent threats in control systems.