Texas ECE alumnus Meng Li has been named the recipient of the 2018 European Design and Automation Association (EDAA) Outstanding Dissertation Award in the area of "New directions in safety, reliability and security-aware hardware design, validation and test for systems and circuits" for his dissertation "A Synergistic Framework for Hardware IP Privacy and Integrity Protection“. This award is established in recognition of the importance of university research to the advancement of design, automation and test. The award will be presented at the opening session of the Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) conference in Florence, Italy in March 2019.

Meng Li received his PhD from Texas ECE in August 2018, and he was supervised by Dr. David Pan. He won First Place at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Research Competition Grand Finals, and two best paper awards (HOST 2017, GLSVLSI 2018). He currently works as a research scientist at Facebook Inc. in Menlo Park, California.