Dr. Athina Markopoulou: Engineering Trust in the Digital Age
Raised by two math teachers who turned problem-solving into a family pastime, Dr. Athina Markopoulou learned at an early age that curiosity and discovery go hand in hand. Her childhood foundation in numbers and critical thinking set her on a path from Athens, Greece to Stanford and, ultimately, to leading-edge research on networked systems, privacy and trustworthy AI.
Today, Dr. Markopoulou — Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine — is a leading innovator at the intersection of computer networking, data privacy, and society’s rapidly expanding digital infrastructure. She has built a career translating rigorous network measurement and systems research into practical tools and policies that help users understand, control, and protect their data. Today, her team examines how data flows through emerging platforms — from smart speakers and children’s apps to virtual reality (VR) headsets and AI-driven services — and how that data can be handled to better protect users.
ProperData: Building Tools to Put Users in Control
As lead principal investigator and director of ProperData, a project under the National Science Foundation (NSF), Dr. Markopoulou heads a cross-institutional collaboration to “protect personal data on the internet.” ProperData is backed by a five-year, $10 million NSF investment across six institutions, bringing together experts in computer science, policy, and law to make personal data flows more transparent and controllable across web, mobile, and internet of things (IoT) ecosystems.
The ProperData team develops conceptual frameworks, monitoring systems, and mediation tools that reveal where personal information goes, who can access it, and how it is used. This includes methodologies and software to measure tracking, profiling and targeting; explore how voice assistants, children’s apps, and IoT devices handle data; study how VR/AR and other sensory platforms track people across apps and services; and provide privacy-enhancing technologies like block lists for users, as well as auditing tools that regulators, nonprofits, and users can apply in practice.
The collaborative is made up of researchers from Boston University, Northeastern University, Princeton, UC Irvine, UC Davis, and the University of Southern California. Each brings specific expertise to the team in focus areas like economics, network measurement, policy, security, and theory.
Dr. Markopoulou (center) with some of her ProperData collaborators, David Choffnes from Northeastern University (left) and Zubair Shafiq from UC Davis. (right). They recently co-organized the inaugural Policy-Relevant Privacy Workshop (PR2), co-located with PETS 2025, in Washington, DC.
Powering Progress Through Federal Support
The targeted and long-term public investments that Dr. Markopoulou and her team receive from NSF help catalyze innovations that benefit Americans across the country – innovations that often get overlooked by the private sector.
“Industry is an essential partner for scaling ideas into products, but it cannot replace the federal government in seeding basic, forward-looking, and open research,” she says. "This kind of research simply wouldn’t happen without robust public funding.”
In a world of 5G networks, IoT environments, and AI, these privacy efforts are helping define what responsible connectivity and AI-powered services look like and position U.S. researchers at the forefront of privacy-aware infrastructure design. By training students, advancing open research, and building large, multi-institution-scale centers of excellence, Dr. Athina Markopoulou’s work demonstrates how sustained federal support for basic research can protect our fundamental rights while driving the next generation of trustworthy digital technology.
Researchers and attendees at ProperData’s second annual symposium at UC Irvine.