Welcome

Dr. Benjamin Tan (he/him/his) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He leads the Calgary Intelligent Systems & Hardware Research Group (CalgaryISH). Before joining the University of Calgary, Dr. Tan was a Research Assistant Professor at New York University with the Center for Cybersecurity. For the 2025-2026 academic year, he will serve as the Associate Head - Graduate Studies (Acting) for the Department of Electrical and Software Engineering.

If you are an existing grad student in our department at UCalgary, the link you are probably looking for is here.

His recent research efforts include projects in collaboration with Intel, and his work has been funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the NSF (USA), DARPA (USA), Alberta Innovates, and the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. At the University of Auckland, he worked as a Professional Teaching Fellow and received a Student’s Choice Top Teacher Award (Top 15 in the Faculty). Before that, he grew up in Auckland. To date, he has not been told who he is assisting to profess.

His current research focuses on improving the security of computer systems at the hardware level and up. This also includes understanding the implications of emerging deep learning techniques, including Large Language Models (LLMs), on the digital system development flow and supply chain.

His work has received a best paper award (ACM TODAES ‘25), another best paper award (SeHAS’24), distinguished paper award (IEEE S&P ‘22), and an outstanding paper award (IEEE TALE ‘18). He is currently an Associate Editor for ACM TODAES. In the past has served as a coordinator and adviser for competitions at CSAW (the most comprehensive student-run cybersecurity event in the world).

Dr. Tan is a Professional Member of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA). He is a Senior Member of IEEE and a member of ACM.