Jan 17, 2020

The Passing of Professor Doug Tygar

The School of Information is sad to announce that Doug Tygar, a long-time professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, passed away unexpectedly on January 16, 2020.

Professor Tygar was a valued community member, teacher, and researcher. As a Professor of Computer Science and a Professor of Information Management and Systems, his work made unique and significant contributions to the fields of usable computer security, cryptography, privacy, and digital rights management.

Professor Tygar was a unique voice in our departments. As a colleague, his sharp sense of humor, infectious laugh, and encyclopedic knowledge of all things Berkeley is irreplaceable. He was an outstanding technical scholar with a deep appreciation of the social aspects of cybersecurity and privacy in practice — a genuine insider in both EECS and the I School.

Doug co-founded the Secure Machine Learning research group in 2004, focused on defining how adversaries can influence and manipulate machine learning algorithms and how to make them robust against such attacks, culminating in a recently published book, Adversarial Machine Learning, with a colleague and two former students. He was a committed teacher and mentor, helping to create and co-teach the first offering of the undergraduate computer security class at Berkeley (CS 161), and most recently helping to craft and launch the School of Information’s Master of Information and Cybersecurity in 2018. Doug was consistent in promoting the careers of women in computing, including his former students Dawn Song, Alma Whitten, and Rachna Dhamija. He will be sorely missed.

Our thoughts are with his friends, family and loved ones.

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Last updated:

February 3, 2020