Biography
Kevin Fu is a professor at Northeastern University's Khoury College of Computer Sciences and College of Engineering, where he founded and directs the Archimedes Center for Health Care and Medical Device Cybersecurity.
Fu’s research vision is a world in which security is designed into all embedded systems, including medical devices, autonomous transportation, manufacturing, and the Internet of Things. His research lab focuses on analog cybersecurity — the modeling and defense against threats to the physics of computation and sensing. Fu’s best-known research, which defended against vulnerabilities in implantable cardiac defibrillators, prompted improvements at medical device manufacturers, global regulators, and international safety standards bodies; the resulting security solutions preempted worldwide ransomware attacks against hospitals by a decade.
Fu has worked to translate his findings into expert counsel and tangible improvements. He has testified in the US House and Senate, penned a report on trustworthy medical device software for the National Academy of Medicine, and served in several federal science advisory groups. He co-founded Virta Labs, a healthcare cybersecurity startup, and N95decon.org, a team that developed emergency decontamination methods for N95 masks during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Before joining Northeastern, Fu served as the inaugural acting director of medical device cybersecurity at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, program director for cybersecurity at the Digital Health Center of Excellence, and associate professor at the University of Michigan.
Fu’s work has earned him a slew of honors, including ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, Sloan Research Fellow, MIT Technology Review TR35 Innovator of the Year, a Fed100 Award, and an NSF CAREER Award. He also received an IEEE Security & Privacy Test of Time Award for his pacemaker security research, as well as best paper awards from USENIX Security, IEEE Security & Privacy, and ACM SIGCOMM.
Fu chairs the USENIX Security Test of Time Awards Selection Committee and previously chaired both the USENIX Security PC and the AAMI cybersecurity working group; the latter created the first FDA-recognized consensus standards to improve the security of medical device manufacturing. He is a member of the AAMI Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology Editorial Board, the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, and the USENIX Security Steering Committee.
Outside academia, Fu channels his creativity into woodworking and artisanal bread-making, and holds a certificate from the French Culinary Institute.
