Areas of Expertise and Qualifications and Leadership

Patrick McDaniel is the inaugural Associate Dean for Research in the College of Computing & Artificial Intelligence and the Tsun-Ming Shih Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and AAAS; a recipient of the SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award and the SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award; and serves as Director of the NSF Frontier Center for Trustworthy Machine Learning, a multi-institutional research center advancing foundational research at the intersection of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and trustworthy computing. He previously served as Program Manager and Lead Scientist for the U.S. Army Research Laboratory's Cyber Security Collaborative Research Alliance (2013–2018), coordinating one of the nation's largest multi-institution cybersecurity research programs.

Professor McDaniel's research spans trustworthy artificial intelligence, computer and network security, distributed systems, and technology policy. His work has made sustained contributions to adversarial machine learning, systems security, software assurance, infrastructure resilience, mobile and embedded systems, and the security of critical digital infrastructure. His research has been recognized with multiple test-of-time awards from leading conferences, including USENIX OSDI (computer systems), ACM PLDI (programming languages), ACM/IEEE ICSE (software engineering), ACSAC (computer security), and IEEE Euro-S&P (security and privacy), reflecting lasting impact across multiple areas of computing.

Research Interests: Professor McDaniel's current research focuses on building trustworthy, secure, and resilient computing systems, with particular emphasis on the interaction of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. His work spans adversarial machine learning, distributed and cloud systems, network measurement and abuse detection, mobile and embedded device security, software assurance and program analysis, election security, and the long-term sustainability of cybersecurity. Across these domains, his research emphasizes experimental rigor, reproducibility, and the translation of scientific advances into deployable technologies.

Advisory Experience and Public Service: Professor McDaniel is an internationally recognized leader in cybersecurity, trustworthy AI, and technology policy, with extensive advisory experience spanning government, academia, industry, and international research organizations. Exemplars of these roles include:

Chair, IEEE Technical Committee on Security
Member, Privacy Scientific Advisory Board, Helmholtz Center for Information Security (CISPA)
Advisor to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
Member, Internetworked Systems Security Network (ISSN)
Member, Technical Guidelines Development Committee, U.S. Election Assistance Commission
Member, President's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC)

These roles reflect his long-standing commitment to advancing scientific innovation while informing public policy, election integrity, telecommunications security, and international research collaboration.

National Science and Technology Policy Leadership: Professor McDaniel has played a leading role in shaping U.S. national research priorities in cybersecurity and trustworthy artificial intelligence. Most recently, he served as lead author of the NSF Secure and Trustworthy Computing 2.0 Vision Statement (2023), which articulated a national roadmap for federal cybersecurity research investment for the coming decade. He also led development of Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity: Opportunities and Challenges (2020) for the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council, helping define strategic research priorities for securing emerging AI systems. Earlier, he led the EVEREST: Evaluation and Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards and Testing study for the Ohio Secretary of State, one of the most influential independent evaluations of electronic voting systems conducted in the United States.