James Mickens granted tenure

Harvard President Lawrence Bacow has approved James Mickens, Professor of Computer Science, to the role of full professor with tenure at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

Mickens joined SEAS in 2015 from Microsoft Research.

His research focuses on distributed systems—how to make them faster, more robust, and more secure. Much of his work centers on large-scale web services and how to design principled system interfaces for those services. He also studies mechanisms for protecting user data from other users and the system itself.

Mickens is also interested in the relationships between technology and society; he is a faculty associate at the Berkman-Klein Center, and he has created a series of popular videos and essays about computer science and its wider impacts.

Mickens received a B.S. degree in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2001. In 2008, he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan. After graduate school, Mickens went to Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, where he spent six years as a member of the Distributed Systems group.

Mickens has taught several courses on systems and security at SEAS, including Operating Systems (CS 161) and Systems Security (CS 263).