Sam Kumar

Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
University of California, Los Angeles
Office: 496B Engineering VI
E-mail: samkumar [at] cs [dot] ucla [dot] edu
GitHub: @samkumar

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at UCLA.

Prior to joining UCLA, I spent a year as a postdoctoral scholar in the FOCI Center at the University of Washington, supervised by Arvind Krishnamurthy and Ratul Mahajan. Before that, I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. I was fortunate to be co-advised by David E. Culler and Raluca Ada Popa. During my Ph.D., I worked in the Sky Computing Lab, the RISE Lab (the predecessor to the Sky Computing Lab), and the Buildings, Energy, and Transportation Systems (BETS) research group. Prior to that, I received my B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. As an undergraduate student, I worked in the Software-Defined Buildings (SDB) research group, which was the predecessor to BETS.

In Fall 2026, I will be teaching CS 239 (course website coming soon).

Research Interests

Broadly speaking, I am interested in system security and networked systems. I am specifically interested in building systems that achieve security and efficiency properties while being applicable to the real world.

Software