Biography: John Villasenor

John Villasenor is a professor at UCLA, where he teaches in the schools of engineering, public affairs, and management, and serves as director of the Digital Technologies Initiative in the Luskin Center for Innovation. In addition, he is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, vice chair of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on the Intellectual Property System, and an affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford.

Villasenor's research addresses signal processing, communications, cybersecurity, networking, and cloud computing, both from the standpoint of algorithms and hardware as well as in terms of their broader policy and legal implications. He is an inventor on approximately 20 issued and pending U.S. patents in areas including communications, information processing, and integrated circuit security.

Villasenor has authored or co-authored nearly 200 peer-reviewed technical publications, and has also written for the Atlantic, Billboard, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Fast Company, Forbes, the Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, Slate, and the Washington Post. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA in 1992, he was with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he developed methods of imaging the earth from space. He holds a B.S in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.