Assistant Professor Tamara Silbergleit Lehman recently received the 2024 Technical and Conference Activities Rising Star Service Award from the IEEE Computer Society, the largest global organization engaging computer scientists and engineers.
The Rising Star Service Award is presented annually to an individual who is 10 years or less into their career and has contributed to advancing computer science and technology.
Lehman, who joined the Department of Electrical, Computer & Energy Engineering at CU Boulder in 2019, focuses on all aspects of computer security from the microarchitectural perspective and has led efforts to make computer architecture more inclusive. Her research interests span a wide array of topics at the intersection of computer architecture and security, aiming to design secure processors that are robust against numerous microarchitectural vulnerabilities.
“Receiving this award encourages me to continue doing the work to improve diversity and inclusion within the computer architecture community,” Lehman said. “I hope this service can help make improvements in the diversity of the community.”
Lehman organized the Career Workshop for Inclusion and Diversity in Computer Architecture (CWIDCA) for five years, which is the longest running workshop of its kind among the computer architecture community. The CWIDCA — in conjunction with MICRO, the top-tier conference in computer architecture research — has supported about 30 students annually for its ninth year in creating networks of diverse researchers across companies, universities and countries. She collaborated with fellow co-organizers, including Valentina Salapura of Google, Alan Bivens of IBM, Professor Hyeran Jeon from University of California Merced and Professor Elaheh Sadredini from University of California Riverside.
As part of her nomination, Professor Yan Solihin from the University of Central Florida remarked, “Tamara goes above and beyond to ensure her role has an impact in the community. It is clear from her impressive record of service and leadership that she truly cares about the success of our community.”
“I want to thank my friend and mentor Professor Iris Bahar for supporting me throughout the years,” said Lehman, “and Professor Yan Solihin for allowing me to serve in the organizing committee as the Travel Awards chair for the 50th Anniversary of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture.”
Lehman has earned numerous awards, including Outstanding Mentor for the Discovery Learning Apprenticeship and Outstanding Service for Inclusion and Diversity at CU Boulder, as well as the DARPA Risers award for her research that is advancing national security. In 2023, she was invited as a keynote speaker for the International Conference on Engineering Applications of Neural Networks in Spain.
She earned a PhD from Duke University in computer engineering. While completing her PhD, Lehman worked two consecutive summers at Intel Labs with the architectural security team in 2015 and 2016, which produced a patent titled, “Cryptographic Cache Lines for A Trusted Execution Environment.” She completed her master’s degree in computer engineering at Duke University and earned a bachelor’s of science from the University of Florida in industrial and systems engineering. Lehman holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Computer Science and is a member of the Colorado Research Center for Democracy and Technology.
She has authored 11 publications for major conferences, including the Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Additionally, she has published in several journals, with one article winning the Best Paper award and another receiving an honorable mention in Micro Top Picks.
