Ozgur Sinanoglu is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is also the managing director of the Center for CyberSecurity. He is currently the chair of the Promotion and Tenure Committee at NYU Abu Dhabi. Between 2016 and 2020, he was the Associate Dean of Engineering at NYU Abu Dhabi.

He earned his B.S. degrees, one in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and one in Computer Engineering, both from Bogazici University, Turkey in 1999. He obtained his MS and PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from University of California San Diego in 2001 and 2004, respectively. He has industry experience at Texas Instruments, IBM and Qualcomm, and has been with NYU Abu Dhabi since 2010.

During his PhD, he won the IBM PhD fellowship award twice. He is also the recipient of the best paper awards at IEEE VLSI Test Symposium 2011 and ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security 2013, which is the #1 cybersecurity venue in the world. His students won awards such as “TTTC's E. J. McCluskey Doctoral Thesis Award” (Samah Saeed, 2014) and "IBM Great Minds Internship Award" (Sachhidh Kannan, 2012), which was the first to be received from the MiddleEast Region.

Prof. Sinanoglu’s research interests include cybersecurity of electronics, and in particular, chips. He has more than 200 conference and journal papers, and 20 issued and pending US Patents, and a book. He has served as track/topic chair or technical program committee member in about 15 conferences, and as (guest) associate editor for around 10 journals. He also chaired and hosted multiple conferences in Abu Dhabi, most notably, ACM Asia Symposium on InformAtion, Computer and Communications Security in 2017 (#1 cybersecurity venue in Asia).

Prof. Sinanoglu is the director of the Design-for-Excellence Lab at NYU Abu Dhabi. His lab has designed and fabricated the first electronic chips that are resilient to reverse engineering and tampering. His research work has been featured various times locally and internationally, most notably by the UAE National multiple times and recently by Ozy.

Sinanoglu's recent research in hardware security and trust has been funded by Mubadala Technology, US National Science Foundation, US Department of Defense (DARPA and Army Research Office), Semiconductor Research Corporation, and Intel Corporation.

According to a recent study by Stanford University, Prof. Sinanoglu is within the top 2% of 17,080 researchers in the "Computer Hardware and Architecture" field in the world. He is the only UAE representative in the top 2% and one of only three in the greater MENA region.

Most research interests for a scientist

Hardware security, Piracy of hardware design, Counterfeiting of electronic chips, Hardware design obfuscation

Specialization

Cybersecurity of electronics, and in particular, chips.