BRAIN SPEC Lab · NC State
Students & mentoring Researchers exploring computer architecture, hardware security, and AI.
Current students Former researchers Earlier mentoring Research group
Current students Ph.D. advisees Ph.D. candidate
Joshua Kalyanapu Security and privacy of integrated hardware accelerators, including microarchitectural side-channel attacks, AI privacy, and defenses that balance power, performance, and privacy. First author of GateBleed.
Joined the lab: Summer 2023
Ph.D. candidate
Darsh Asher AI privacy and secure microarchitectural design. First author of FeatureBleed.
Joined the lab: Fall 2024
Ph.D. student
Kaushal Mhapsekar Generative AI for cache-policy design and analysis, hardware fuzzing, and CPU performance. First author of CacheMind.
Joined the lab: Summer 2025
Ph.D. student
Bita Aslrousta Brain-inspired microarchitectural optimization and CPU cache replacement policies. Coauthor of CacheMind.
Joined the lab: Summer 2025
Ph.D. student
Amna Hassan Microarchitecture and generative-AI hardware footprints.
Joined the lab: Fall 2026
Undergraduate researcher Achyuta Kannan Spring 2026 Undergraduate Research Fellow NC State
Former students & researchers Graduate researchers Ferhat Yaman M.S., Fall 2023 · Thesis: AgentSCA: Advanced Physical Side Channel Analysis Agent with LLMs. AgentSCA thesis PDF Farshad Dizani Ph.D. research mentorship, 2023–August 2026 · First author of Thor (IEEE CAL 2025). LinkedIn Azam Ghanbari Ph.D. research mentorship, 2023–August 2026 · Coauthor of GateBleed, Thor, and CacheMind. LinkedIn Farzad Mehri Ph.D. research advisee, 2023–2024. LinkedIn Pascal Bastien M.S. research, Computer Engineering, 2023–2024. Brijesh Bhayana M.S. research, Computer Science, 2025–2026. Vincent Abraham M.S. research, Electrical and Computer Engineering. Sayinath Karuppanan M.S. research, Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2022–2023. Hari Vignesh Baskar M.S. research, Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2022–2023. Nandan Dayal M.S. research, Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2022–2023. Sai Praneeth Madduri M.S. research, Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2022–2023. Undergraduate researchers · 2023–2024 Meghana Ponnapati BRAIN SPEC undergraduate research Anant Patel BRAIN SPEC undergraduate research Asmita Malakar BRAIN SPEC undergraduate research Texas A&M & UC San Diego
Earlier research mentoring Brady Testa Texas A&M · M.S. research; coauthor of Dynamic Set Stealing to Improve Cache Performance. James Coman Texas A&M · M.S. research on simulation of address-translation techniques. Zhenya Ma UC San Diego · Ph.D. research on cryptanalysis of hardware prefetching. Sankara Ramesh UC San Diego · M.S. research on diagnostic machine learning for microarchitecture. Sumiran Shubhi UC San Diego · M.S. research on secure branch-prediction design.