Yaling Yang

Speaker Bio

Yaling Yang is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech and a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Computing. Her research focuses on wireless and cellular network security, network modeling and simulation, and the design and evaluation of robust networked systems. She has extensive expertise in high-fidelity system-level simulation and experimentation, with a long track record of developing advanced network simulators for realistic performance and security evaluation.

Dr. Yang’s work has been recognized with multiple prestigious awards, including the Best Paper Award at IEEE SECON 2011 for her innovative IoT simulator capable of capturing timing and energy consumption down to the hardware cycle level, and the Best Paper Award at ACM WiSec 2025 for experimentally validated research on distributed multi-antenna GPS spoofing attacks. Her research bridges rigorous system modeling, real-world prototyping, and adversarial security analysis, enabling impactful advances in emerging cyber-physical and telecom systems.

Dr. Yang received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has served as Principal Investigator on numerous NSF-funded projects. She is an NSF CAREER Award recipient and was named a Faculty Fellow of the Virginia Tech College of Engineering in 2016.