Rate My Professor Olya Ohrimenko

Olya Ohrimenko is a Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems within the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Melbourne, a position she assumed in January 2025 after serving as Associate Professor from 2022 to 2024 and Senior Lecturer from 2020 to 2021. She joined the university in early 2020. Previously, she worked as a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, for six years, leading projects on Confidential AI and I/O side-channel mitigation. Ohrimenko was also a Microsoft Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge University from 2014 to 2016 and a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research from 2022 to 2023. She holds a B.CS. (Hons) degree from the University of Melbourne in 2007, supervised by Peter Stuckey, and Sc.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Brown University in 2013, supervised by Roberto Tamassia. During her doctoral studies, she completed internships at IBM Research Zurich with Christian Cachin, Microsoft Research Redmond with Seny Kamara, and Google on two occasions.

Ohrimenko's research focuses on the security, privacy, and integrity of machine learning algorithms, data analysis tools, multi-party computation, and systems relying on cloud storage, computation, and hardware, with the goal of identifying vulnerabilities and developing efficient solutions offering provable guarantees. Her interests also encompass algorithms, data structures, and theory. She serves as Lead Chief Investigator on the National Intelligence Defence Grant from the Australian Office of National Intelligence in 2025, Deputy Director and Chief Investigator on the ARC Training Centre for Transformative Health Sensing Technologies valued at $5 million over five years starting in 2025, Principal Investigator on the DSTG/ASCA Research Agreement Variation on Adversarial Reinforcement Learning: Attacks and Defences in 2024, and Principal Investigator on the joint MURI-AUSMURI Cybersecurity Assurance for Teams of Computers and Humans project from 2021 to 2024. Notable honors include a Commendation for Outstanding Research Contribution in the 2025 CORE awards, finalist positions in the AI in Cyber Security category of the Women in AI Asia-Pacific Awards in 2023 and 2024, and the 2025 Classic Paper Award from Constraints Journal for 'Propagation via lazy clause generation' published in 2008. She has secured research awards from Facebook and Oracle, along with contracts from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and National Australia Bank. Her scholarship garners over 4,800 citations on Google Scholar, underscoring her influence in privacy and security.