Voptika honored with Sunrise award

At the intersection of cybersecurity, human behavior, and education, Lin Family Assistant Professor Daniel Votipka is reimagining how we protect digital systems. This vision, along with his commitment to innovation at Tufts, has earned him the 2025 Sunrise Award, the School of Engineering’s annual honor.

Selected by the Engineering Faculty Research Awards Committee (EFRAC), the award recognizes outstanding scholarly accomplishments by a junior faculty member within their discipline. EFRAC includes members of the Engineering Dean’s Council and is chaired by Matthew Panzer, Professor and Dean of Research for the School of Engineering. Votipka’s research focuses on computer security, with an emphasis on human factors affecting security professionals. He investigates how experts perform tasks such as vulnerability discovery, network defense, and malware analysis to better understand their processes and decision-making. 

“The high-level goal of my research is to democratize the vulnerability discovery process by building more usable tools that make the process more accessible, and improving education to bring more qualified people into the market,” Votipka said in a 2021 interview, shortly after he joined Tufts.

Earlier this year, Votipka received the prestigious NSF CAREER Award to support his project, “Increasing Human-Centered Threat Modeling Research’s Reliability.” Threat modeling, an essential process for anticipating and preventing cyberattacks, often relies on predicting human behavior, which can make it difficult to design reliable methods. Votipka’s project builds on his prior work to create a more human-centered approach, aiming to improve the consistency and impact of threat modeling practices.

His scholarship has been published in leading venues such as the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, IEEE Secure Development Conference, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, and the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. His work has received funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) CORE program, Cisco, and MedCrypt Inc., and has been recognized with distinction awards from USENIX Security.

Beyond his research, Votipka co-directs the Tufts Security and Privacy Lab and is affiliated with the Tufts Cybersecurity Center for the Public Good (CyPuG) and the Institute for Research on Learning and Instruction (IRLI).

Votipka’s work is helping to shape the future of cybersecurity, making complex processes more accessible and reliable. Congratulations to Professor Votipka on this well-deserved recognition.

Learn more about Lin Family Assistant Professor Daniel Vopikta.