Phuong M. Cao

Phuong M. Cao is a Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research makes AI-for-Science reliable and secure on the world's largest supercomputers. Deployed in production, his systems protect open-science workloads and federated identities against cyberattacks and hardware (GPU) failures. Building on real-world measurements from leadership computing facilities, he develops failure-prediction and attack-preemption models for emerging architectures such as Quantum-HPC and High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC).

As a Principal Investigator and a Fellow of the National Science Foundation (NSF), he curates security data lakes, measures post-quantum cryptography adoption, and verifies federated authentication across open-science networks. Working with DOE national labs (Argonne), NSF testbeds (FABRIC and the National Research Platform), and industry (IBM Research), his work appears at USENIX Security, NSDI, Supercomputing, DSN (Best Paper Award), IEEE QCE, and ACM CoNEXT, and his resilience models have been adopted in exascale supercomputers.

At UIUC he was advised by Ravishankar Iyer and Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, and holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a bachelor's degree from Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Vietnam.

He serves as Deputy Executive Director for the Joint Laboratory for Extreme Scale Computing (JLESC), is a Trusted Cyberinfrastructure Fellow at the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, and contributes to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Secure High-Performance Computing working group. His UIUC affiliations include Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL), the Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation, and the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute.