Rate My Professor Flavio Esposito

Flavio Esposito, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator in the Department of Computer Science at Saint Louis University, a position he has held since August 2021, following five years as Assistant Professor there from 2016 to 2021. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Boston University in 2013 and his Master of Science in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Florence, Italy, in 2005. Prior to his academic career at SLU, Esposito worked as Senior Software Engineer at Exegy Inc. in St. Louis from 2013 to 2016. His earlier professional experience encompasses research internships at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey (2009), Raytheon BBN Technologies in Massachusetts (2008), and EURECOM Institute in France (2007), as well as a Research Scientist role at the Centre for Wireless Communications in Finland (2006) and a permanent contract at Alcatel-Lucent in Italy (2006).

Esposito's research interests include network management, network virtualization, distributed systems, software-defined networks, edge computing, and cyber-physical systems with applications to medicine and agriculture. As principal investigator, he has received multiple National Science Foundation grants, including a three-year $900,000 award in 2025 titled REPAIRT for securing xApps in Open RANs, a $206,206 grant in 2019 for elastic cloud applications, and a $200,000 grant in 2016. His work has garnered over 4,600 citations according to Google Scholar. Key publications feature Mutant: Learning Congestion Control from Existing Protocols via Online Reinforcement Learning (USENIX NSDI 2025), Owl: Congestion Control with Partially Invisible Networks via Reinforcement Learning (IEEE INFOCOM 2021), A Distributed Orchestration Algorithm for Edge Computing Resources with Guarantees (IEEE INFOCOM 2019), and Music-Defined Networking (ACM HotNets 2018). Esposito co-founded Spaghetti Code Labs, developing the cybersecurity educational app WeeNet with more than 5.7 million downloads. He was honored with the Outstanding Graduate Faculty Award from SLU's Parks College of Engineering, Aviation and Technology in Spring 2021 and was a finalist for the Undergraduate Mentoring Award from the College of Arts and Sciences. His academic service includes TPC co-chair roles for IEEE NFV-SDN 2022 and ACM CoNEXT events, and associate editor for Wiley Internet Technology Letters since 2017.