Wenjing Lou named fellow of Association for Computing Machinery
Also named one of the Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate, Lou is now a fellow in the world's largest scientific and educational computing society.
Wenjing Lou, the W.C. English Professor in the Department of Computer Science, has been named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Established in 1947, the Association for Computing Machinery is a nonprofit professional membership organization, reporting nearly 110,000 student and professional members as of 2022. Its fellows program recognizes the top 1 percent of its members for outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology, as well as outstanding service to the association and the larger computing community.
A member of the Virginia Tech faculty since 2011, Lou’s research in information and network security is a major component of the university’s growing reputation and impact in the critically important area of cybersecurity.
She has made innovative and widely cited research contributions in a broad range of challenging security and privacy contexts, including problems arising in wireless networks, mobile ad hoc networks, sensor networks, network management and routing, and data security and privacy in the cloud.
Based at the Virginia Tech Research Center — Arlington, today she is an affiliate faculty member of the Virginia Tech-led Commonwealth Cyber Initiative and holds a courtesy appointment in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She co-founded the Complex Networks and Security Research Lab in 2011 with Professor Tom Hou to conduct basic and applied research in networking, wireless, and cybersecurity.
This year, Lou was also one of six Virginia Tech researchers recently named to Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers 2023 list. A global company that maintains the Web of Science, Clarivate compiles an annual list of researchers who demonstrated significant influence through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade.
Lou’s work has been recognized with numerous other honors, including receiving the Virginia Tech Alumni Award for Research Excellence, the Technical Recognition Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Communications Society Technical Committee on Security, and her recognition as an IEEE Fellow.
She has filled numerous leadership roles at the top international conferences and has been associate editor for several premier journals. She led the establishment of the IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security and was the steering committee chair of this conference from 2013-20.
Lou served from 2014-17 as program director at the National Science Foundation, where she managed the network security portfolio in NSF’s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program and the wireless networks portfolio in the Networking Technology and Systems program. The program is the largest computer science research program at the National Science Foundation and the largest unclassified cybersecurity research program in the world.
She received her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Florida.
