Biography
Brian Levine joined the UMass Computer Science faculty in Fall 1999 as an assistant professor. He was promoted to Professor in 2010. He was named an ACM Fellow in 2020 "for contributions to network forensics, security, and privacy, and for thwarting crimes against children".
He serves as the founding Director of the UMass Amherst Cybersecurity Institute. During the 2020 academic year, he is a Visiting Scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. From summer 2020, he has served as a consultant to the National Institute of Justice leading a special project.
He received his Master's and PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1996 and 1999, respectively. His research concerns the security, privacy, and forensic examination of networks. He has published more than 90 papers on these topics and received over 19,000 citations to these works. Since arriving at UMass, Brian has been the PI of research awards totaling more than $12 million, and co-PI on additional awards from sponsors including the National Science Foundation, DARPA, the Department of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Protection, and private industry.
He received an NSF CAREER award in 2002 for work in peer-to-peer networking. He was a UMass Lilly Teaching Fellow in 2003 and was awarded his college's Outstanding Teacher Award in 2007. In 2008, he received the Alumni Award for Excellence in Science and Technology from the Univ. at Albany. In 2011, he was awarded the College of Natural Science's Outstanding Research Award, out of faculty from 15 departments.He served as an associate editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 2005--2010. He was the TPC co-chair of ACM MobiCom 2011, TPC vice-chair of the 2011 DFRWS Annual Forensics Research conference, and TPC Chair of the 2012 DFRWS Annual Forensics Research Conference. From 2015 to 2019, he served as an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Mobile Computing. He is a founding co-organizer of the New England Security Day. In 2012, he was invited to give testimony to the US Sentencing Commission hearing on "Federal Child Pornography Offenses". In 2013, he was the opening keynote speaker for the USENIX SYSTOR conference, and in December 2015, he was the opening keynote speaker at the Yahoo Tech Pulse conference. He was awarded the 2017 IEEE Infocom Test of Time Award for work in mobile computing published in 2006 and "widely recognized to have a significant impact on the research community.” His lab’s forensics tools are used daily in every US state and by many federal agencies that investigate crimes against children. These tools have resulted in the rescue by law enforcement of many hundreds of sexually abused children.
Brian enjoys maintaining links with industry. He was VP of Research during a sabbatical spent at Fiksu, Inc. (Boston), and has spent summers working Intel Research Lab (Cambridge, UK) and Sprint Advanced Technology Lab (San Francisco), and as a graduate student back in the 20th century he interned at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis (France), Bell Labs (New Jersey), and Sun Labs (Mountain View).