Biography
Weidong Zhu is an assistant professor in the Knight Foundation School of Computing & Information Sciences (KFSCIS) at Florida International University. His research focuses on developing novel solutions for system security, with a specific focus on storage system security and privacy, ransomware defense, trustworthy computing, and hardware-software security integration.
Before joining FIU in 2025, he completed his Ph.D. at the University of Florida, where his dissertation research on leveraging storage semantics for data security was recognized at the ACM CCS Doctoral Symposium. His research work has been published in top conferences and journals, such as the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), and ACM Transactions on Storage.
Zhu is dedicated to solving real-world cybersecurity challenges and actively mentors students in the discovery of security vulnerabilities across computer system software and hardware stacks.
Awards & Honors
- Travel Grant from CCS, 2024
- Scholarship from The Gartner Group Graduate Fellowship, University of Florida, 2024
- SK Hynix Best Paper Award at HotStorage, 2023
- USENIX ATC Student Grant, 2023
- Scholarship from The Gartner Group Graduate Fellowship, University of Florida, 2023
Education
- Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Florida, 2025
- MS, Computer Science, Xiamen University, 2019
- BE, Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 2016