Blase Ur

Blase Ur is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Chicago. He founded the UChicago SUPERgroup, an interdisciplinary research collective with dozens of members. Their research spans computer security, privacy, and human-computer interaction (HCI). They are especially interested in using data-driven methods to help users make better security and privacy decisions, as well as to make complex computer systems more usable for non-technical users. Their work has been supported by six NSF grants, as well as grants from Mozilla Research and the Data Transparency Lab.

He has been fortunate to receive three best paper awards (CHI 2017, USENIX Security 2016, and UbiComp 2014), the 2018 SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award, the 2016 John Karat Usable Privacy and Security Student Research Award, an NDSEG fellowship, a Fulbright scholarship, and three honorable mentions for best paper (CHI 2020, CHI 2016, and CHI 2012). Jointly with the other core members of the CMU passwords group, he also received the 2020 Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence and the 2018 IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice. He has strong interests in teaching and K-12 outreach, particularly for broadening participation in CS. He earned my AB in computer science from Harvard University and worked for three years at Rutgers University on outreach and diversity programs.