Team Members

Dr. Amro Awad

Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering (Focus on Digital Technologies), University of Oxford Tutorial Fellow, University College (Univ) · Co-Director, Hardware AI Governance Lab (HAIGL)

Amro Awad is an Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering (Focus on Digital Technologies) at the University of Oxford. He is also a Tutorial Fellow at University College (Univ). Amro co-directs the Hardware AI Governance Lab (HAIGL) at Oxford. His research is focused on architectural innovations to enable secure computing systems. Before moving to Oxford, he led the Secure and Advanced Computer Architecture (SACA) research group at NC State as a tenured Associate Professor. Besides academic experience, he had several industrial stints at HP Labs, AMD Research, and MediaTek USA. He also worked at US government labs, including Los Alamos National Lab, Sandia National Laboratories, and Air Force Research Labs.

Amro has ten granted U.S. patents (as of April 2026), has been inducted to the prestigious IEEE TCCA HPCA Hall of Fame, and has been an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO) (since Feb. 2024), the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC) (since Feb. 2025), and the IEEE Computer Architecture Letters (since Mar. 2026). His team’s research outcomes were featured in the top conferences in computer architecture and nominated for best paper awards (e.g., IEEE/ACM MICRO’23, IEEE VR’22, ACM ICS’21). He is a recipient of the Bennett Faculty Fellowship (2023) and Goodnight Early Career (2023) awards. He served as a PC chair and General Chair of major conferences such as IEEE ICCD’22 and IEEE IISWC’19, respectively. He founded the first workshop on advances in confidential computing (ConfAD), and is a founding member of the IEEE Machine Learning Circuits and Systems (MLCAS) committee.

His work identified challenges for efficiently enabling secure memory with emerging NVM technologies (Osiris@MICRO’18, Anubis@ISCA’19, Triad-NVM@ISCA’19, Dolos@MICRO’21, Horus@MICRO’22, Toth@HPCA’23), devised the first security work arguing for reduced overhead implementations through authenticating memory devices (ObfusMem@ISCA’17), cryptographic memory data shredding (SilentShredder@ASPLOS’16), cryptographic access control (CryptoMMU@MICRO’23), bandwidth-efficient GPU memory security (Plutus@HPCA’23, Salus@HPCA’24), and efficient security and access control for disaggregated memory systems (Minerva@IPDPS’22, DeACT@HPCA’21). Finally, and perhaps what he is most proud of as a product, he trained to completion seven excellent PhD students and two post-doctoral scholars (as of April 2026).

• IEEE TCCA HPCA Hall of Fame
• Bennett Faculty Fellowship (2023)
• Goodnight Early Career Award (2023)
• Best Paper Candidates: MICRO’23, IEEE VR’22, ICS’21