Stacy Patterson is an Associate Professor and the Associate Head and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Computer Science. Her research focuses on distributed computing systems, machine learning, and data privacy, where she applies mathematical theory and formal verification to derive provable guarantees about practical applications spanning finance, aviation, cloud computing, and edge computing. Current projects include:Privacy-preserving federated learning for financial fraud preventionPrivate synthetic data generation for financial applicationsQuantum machine learningPerformance optimization for Gen AI, with applications in information retrieval and code generationFormal verification for safety-critical systems, such as future aviation systemsHer research has been supported by grants from NSF, the RPI-IBM AI Research Collaboration, and the NSF IUCRC Center for Research toward Advancing Financial Technologies (CRAFT). She has collaborated with industry partners including PSEG, IBM, and Swift. Dr. Patterson earned her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She subsequently held postdoctoral appointments with the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems, and Computation at UC Santa Barbara, and with the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology. She is a recipient of a Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professorship,  the IEEE Control Systems Society George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award, and the NSF CAREER Award.