Neil Zhao is an Assistant Professor and a Fellow of the AMD Chair in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include Computer Architecture, Hardware/System Security, and Cloud Computing. Specifically, his work focuses on (1) practical microarchitectural side-channel attacks and defenses in production cloud environments and (2) confidential computing in clouds.

Neil Zhao received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2024, where he was advised by Prof. Josep Torrellas. Prior to that, he completed his Bachelor of Science in Applied Physics at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2018.