Virgil Dorin Gligor

Researcher in computer security addressing problems of trustworthy computing in the presence of malware and malicious insiders, and in next-generation secure Internet design, Gligor is a Romanian-American Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has also served as co-Director of the university's CyLab. His research interests have ranged from access control mechanisms, penetration analysis, and denial-of-service protection to cryptographic protocols.

He was born in Zalău, Romania, where he earned a national scholarship to study in the United States. According to him, "his childhood in the 'very controlled environment' of Romanian communism and the later authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu informed his belief that 'security cannot be an excuse for compromising individual and institutional freedom.'" Gligor earned his B.Sc. (1972), M.Sc. (1973), and Ph.D. (1976) degrees from the University of California at Berkeley.

He joined the University of Maryland as a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1976, serving there until 2007. In 2008, he became a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he has also served as co-Director of the university's CyLab. Gligor has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge in 1999, at ETH Zurich in 2005, and at EPF Lausanne in 2006. He has also served as a Research Professor at Singapore Management University and the University of Maryland from 2008 to 2011.

In addition, Gligor has served as a consultant to Burroughs Corporation, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP. He has served as an Editorial Board member of several ACM and IEEE journals and as Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing. On December 6, 2005, he received the 2006 National Information Systems Security Award from the United States, jointly given by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Security Agency (NSA). He also received the 2011 Outstanding Innovation Award of the ACM SIG on Security Audit and Control, and in 2013 was the recipient of the Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Computer Society "for pioneering work and leadership in the area of computer and network security."