Dr. Samah Saeed, CCNY computer engineer and 2026 NSF CAREER Award winner
Samah M. Saeed, associate professor of electrical engineering in The City College of New York’s Grove School of Engineering, is the winner of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. Recipients of this prestigious and highly competitive award are considered the best and brightest talents in the United States. Many of the winners later became world-famous scientists and Nobel laureates.
A computer engineer, Saeed’s award is for her project titled “CAREER: Towards Secure and Reliable Cloud-Based Quantum Computers.” It aims to bridge the gap between the theoretical foundations of secure quantum computing and the practical limitations of near-term quantum systems. It focuses on enhancing both the integrity and confidentiality of quantum applications executed on cloud-based platforms, considering different trust models that capture different threat scenarios in this setting.
“An early outcome of this work is my recent paper to be presented in May at the IEEE International Symposium on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), which has been selected as a Best Paper Award candidate,” said Saeed. “This project builds on a rapidly expanding research program focused on building reliable, secure, and scalable quantum systems that I am leading at CCNY. That includes work on near-term quantum computing system reliability and quantum computing resource optimization in homogeneous, heterogenous, and distributed quantum computing environment supported by U.S. Department of Energy [DoE] awards, as well as research on reliable and secure quantum networking funded by AFRL [Air Force Research Laboratory], and co-designing security and reliability features of quantum hardware supported by Google.”
This is Saeed’s latest major award. In 2023, she was a co-recipient of a $4.6 million [DoE] grant to advance quantum computing. The funding was for her project, “Toward Efficient Quantum Algorithm Execution on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Hardware.”
In addition to her academic role in the Grove School, Saeed is also director of CCNY’s SEcure & Reliable Systems (SERS) Laboratory, a research group whose main focus is system reliability and security. SERS’ research spans from classical to quantum computing systems. Its mission is to enable reliable and secure breakthrough applications for quantum and classical systems by making them more resilient to errors during mission mode and exposing and preventing any malicious activities that leak sensitive information or change functionality.
Saeed is also an affiliated faculty of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
She earned her Ph.D. in computer science from the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. Her research interests span hardware security, secure quantum computing systems, quantum circuit compilation and synthesis, quantum networking, and testing digital integrated circuits.
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Jay Mwamba
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