Michael W. Hicks
| Michael W. Hicks | |
|---|---|
| Born | |
| 🏳️ Citizenship | American |
| 🎓 Alma mater | Pennsylvania State University (BS) University of Pennsylvania (MS, PhD) |
| 💼 Occupation | |
| Known for | Programming language design Software security Dynamic software updating Cyclone programming language Fuzz testing |
| 🏅 Awards | ACM Fellow (2022) NSF CAREER Award (2004) ACM SIGPLAN Doctoral Dissertation Award (2001) |
Michael W. Hicks is an American computer scientist. His work is in programming languages and software security. He is a professor in the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also serves as the director of the Schlein Center for Cybersecurity.[1] He is emeritus professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a former chair of ACM SIGPLAN.[2][3]
Education
Hicks earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Pennsylvania State University. He received both his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001.[2] His doctoral dissertation, titled "Dynamic Software Updating," won the ACM SIGPLAN Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2001.[3]
Career and research
After completing his Ph.D., Hicks spent one year as a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University, affiliated with the Information Assurance Institute of the Computer Science Department.[4]
From 2002 to 2021, Hicks was a professor in the Computer Science Department and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) at the University of Maryland, College Park. At Maryland, he co-founded and directed the Programming Languages at the University of Maryland (PLUM) research group and served as the inaugural Director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (2011–2013).[5] He took a leave of absence from 2022 to 2025 to work as a Senior Principal Scientist at Amazon Web Services (AWS),[6] where he co-led the development of Cedar, a domain-specific language for writing authorization policies. He joined the University of Pennsylvania as a professor in 2025.[7]
Hicks's research focuses on using programming language techniques including formal verification, domain-specific language design, type systems, program analysis, and fuzzing to improve the security, reliability, and availability of software. Hicks co-authored Evaluating Fuzz Testing (CCS '18), a methodology for evaluating fuzz testing tools.[8][9] Through a survey of 32 fuzzing papers, the authors identified systematic flaws in existing evaluation practices and carried out experiments that demonstrated the negative effect of these flaws in practice.[10][11] The paper won the NSA Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Award for 2018.[12]
He is also known for his work on dynamic software updating, which allows software to be updated without shutting it down.[13]
Honors and awards
- 2022: ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award
- 2022: ACM Fellow
- 2019: NSA's Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Award
- 2015: University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher
- 2004: NSF CAREER Award
- 2001: ACM SIGPLAN Doctoral Dissertation Award
References
- ↑ "Michael Hicks". Upenn.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Michael Hicks". www.cs.umd.edu. Retrieved 2026-06-06.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Dr. Michael W Hicks". awards.acm.org. Retrieved 2026-06-06.
- ↑ "Dr. Michael Hicks to Lead Maryland Cybersecurity Center as Director". me.umd.edu. Retrieved 2026-06-06.
- ↑ "Defense Software for a Contested Future". www.nationalacademies.org. Retrieved 2026-06-06.
- ↑ "Michael Hicks -". conf.researchr.org. Retrieved 2026-06-06.
- ↑ "Michael Hicks - 'Programming' 2023". 2023.programming-conference.org. Retrieved 2026-06-06.
- ↑ "IEEE TCSP - Michael Hicks on Why Building Security In Requires New Ways of Thinking". www.ieee-security.org. Retrieved 2026-06-06.
- ↑ www.sos-vo.org https://www.sos-vo.org/node/64232. Retrieved 2026-06-06. Missing or empty
|title=(help) - ↑ Klees, George; Ruef, Andrew; Cooper, Benji; Wei, Shiyi; Hicks, Michael (2018-10-18). "Evaluating Fuzz Testing". arXiv:1808.09700 [cs.CR].
- ↑ "FuzzBench". FuzzBench. Retrieved 2026-06-06.
- ↑ "Hicks Wins NSA's Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Award". cyber.umd.edu. Retrieved 2026-06-06.
- ↑ "DYNAMIC SOFTWARE UPDATING Michael Hicks" (PDF). Sigplan.
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