Rate My Professor Nektarios Tsoutsos

Nektarios Tsoutsos is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Delaware, with a joint appointment in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University, with a dissertation titled “Private and Trustworthy Computation Using Additive Cryptographic Primitives,” an M.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Columbia University, and a five-year Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. Before joining the University of Delaware, Tsoutsos was a postdoctoral researcher and research assistant at New York University and a graduate technical intern at Intel's Security Center of Excellence in Hillsboro, Oregon. He currently serves as Co-Director of the University of Delaware's FinTech Innovation Hub, Associate Director of the Center for Cybersecurity, Assurance, and Privacy, a member of the Delaware Cyber Security Advisory Council, and a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Tsoutsos's research focuses on cybersecurity and applied cryptography, particularly hardware security, trustworthy computing, and privacy outsourcing, including homomorphic encryption for privacy-preserving computation, verifiable secure hardware design, and side-channel leakage mitigation. As principal investigator or co-principal investigator, he has secured major grants from the National Science Foundation, such as the CAREER Award (NSF 2239334, $534k, 2023–2028) for accelerating encrypted computation on diverse hardware, SaTC CORE (NSF 2453861, $600k, 2025–2028), CyberCorps Scholarship for Service (NSF 2336586, $3.43M, 2024–2028), and others totaling millions in funding. His awards include the NSF CAREER Award, University of Delaware Research Foundation Award, Pearl Brownstein Doctoral Research Award, Deborah Rosenthal Award, and recognition as one of Delaware’s 15 Most Influential Business Leaders in 2023. Key publications encompass “PEEV: Parse Encrypt Execute Verify - A Verifiable FHE Framework” (IEEE Access, 2024), “Data Privacy Made Easy: Enhancing Applications with Homomorphic Encryption” (ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems, 2025), “Juliet: A Robust and Configurable Encrypted Processor” (IEEE Transactions on Computers, 2024), “HELM: Navigating Homomorphic Encryption through Gates and Lookup Tables” (IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 2025), and “Sok: New Insights into Fully Homomorphic Encryption Libraries” (PoPETs, 2023). His contributions advance secure systems design and have earned his students top honors at competitions like the CSAW Embedded Security Challenge.