Assistant Professor
Email: nicolas.papernot@utoronto.ca

The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE)

Nicolas Papernot is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) within the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering; Department of Computer Science within the Faculty of Arts & Science; and is cross-appointed to the Faculty of Law. He also holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute and is a faculty affiliate at U of T's Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. His research interests span the security and privacy of machine learning.
 
Some of his group’s recent projects include generative model collapse, cryptographic auditing of ML, private learning, proof-of-learning, and machine unlearning. Professor Papernot is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computer Science, a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellow, and a Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars.
 
His work on differentially private machine learning was awarded an outstanding paper at ICLR 2022 and a best paper at ICLR 2017. He co-created the IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML) and co-chaired its first two editions in 2023 and 2024. He previously served as an associate chair of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), and an area chair of NeurIPS.
 
Professor Papernot earned his PhD at the Pennsylvania State University, working with Prof. Patrick McDaniel and was supported by a Google PhD Fellowship. Upon graduating, he spent a year at Google DeepMind where he still spends some of his time.
Awards and distinctions
Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computer Science
Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellow
Member, Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars
Google PhD Fellowship