Her research combines theory, programming languages, and systems techniques to design computing platforms that are efficient, easy to program, and provably secure. Elaine Shi's research has been recognized with several awards, including an NSA Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Award, a UMD Invention of the Year Award, and an ACM CCS Best Student Paper Award. Shi is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship (2014), Google Faculty Research Awards (2013 and 2014), and winner of the IJCNN/Kaggle Social Network Challenge (2011). Elaine is on the board of the Cryptocurrency Research Group (CCRG). She obtained her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. Prior to joining Maryland, she was a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and UC Berkeley.