Dr. Kanad Basu
- Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Fellow, Eugene McDermott Distinguished Professor
The McDermott Professorships were established in August 2017, funded by an anonymous gift, with the goal of providing early career support and recognition to faculty members who have established extraordinary records of research productivity, teaching excellence and university service, and who show promise of being leaders of the UT Dallas faculty in the future.
“Hardware is the last line of defense for any safety or security threat in computing environments. The McDermott Professorship will support our efforts to make next-generation hardware more reliable and secure.”
Dr. Kanad Basu’s research focuses on an overlooked cybersecurity tool: computer hardware.
The best-known cybersecurity defense – antivirus software – comes with limitations because malware constantly changes. The need for additional types of protection has propelled the development of approaches that use hardware to detect threats.
Basu received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award in 2025 to support his research in security-aware next generation embedded hardware design.
Basu’s research interests include hardware-based malware detection; functional safety; quantum computing; edge computing, which brings computation and storage closer to the sources of data; and neomorphic computing, an approach that mimics the structure and function of the human brain.
Previously, Basu and his collaborators developed an approach to protect quantum computers against adversarial attacks. He also developed a tool that can determine whether an Android game or other mobile app complies with the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
Basu joined The University of Texas at Dallas in 2019 from New York University, where he was an assistant research professor. Prior to that, Basu spent more than five years in industry, including at IBM, where he worked as an engineer on the design of IBM Power servers and IBM Z processors; and at Synopsys Inc., where he helped develop DFTMAX Ultra, the state-of-the-art low pin hardware test solution. He also worked as an intern at Intel Corp.
At UT Dallas, Basu is the principal investigator of the Trustworthy and Intelligent Embedded System Research Lab.
His research has been supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy, Ford Motor Co., Intel, NSF, Semiconductor Research Corp. and the Technology Innovation Institute.
Basu earned a PhD and a Master of Science in computer engineering from the University of Florida. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electronics and telecommunication engineering from Jadavpur University in India.