Ling Ren
Associate Professor
(217) 244-0761
4312 Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science
For More Information
Education
- Ph.D., Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018
Academic Positions
- Associate Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, August 2025 -- present
- Assistant Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Department of Computer Science, August 2019 -- August 2025
Research Interests
- Security and Privacy
- Secure Distributed Algorithms
- Cryptography
Research Areas
Research Honors
- Test-of-Time Award at CCS (2023)
- Chaincode Lab Bitcoin Research Prize (2023)
- Google Research Scholar Award (2023)
- NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) (2022)
- Best Paper Runner-up at CCS (2021)
- Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security at ICCAD (2018)
- Best Student Paper Award at CCS (2013 )
Recent Courses Taught
- CS 461 (ECE 422) - Computer Security I
- CS 591 SP - Security and Privacy
- CS 598 CAL - Consensus Algorithms
- CS 598 FTD - Fault-Tolerant Dist Algorithms
- ECE 526 (CS 539) - Distributed Algorithms
News Notes
- 2/11/2026
Watch CS professor Ling Ren's a16z crypto talk on the commit latency of Byzantine consensus protocols. He discusses the tight good-case commit latency in various settings, and the concurrent 2-and-3-round design paradigm. a16z crypto is advancing the science and technology of the next generation of the internet.