Asaf Cidon, associate professor of electrical engineering at Columbia Engineering, received tenure effective July 1, 2026, recognizing his contributions to research, teaching and innovation in computer systems.
Cidon, who joined Columbia Engineering in 2019, conducts research on software systems and cloud infrastructure. His work reimagines cloud infrastructure to account for new workloads (AI training and inference, agentic sandboxes) and emerging hardware (tiered memory, tiered storage, high speed networks and interconnects). He is also affiliated with the Department of Computer Science and the Data Science Institute.
Since joining Columbia, Cidon’s work has been recognized by best paper awards in the top computer systems conferences (SOSP’26, OSDI’22), typically awarded to 1-2 papers a year, as well as top security (USENIX Security’19) and database conferences (CIDR’24). Cidon has also received the NSF CAREER and Army Research Office Young Investigator Awards. He also became a member of the OSDI/SOSP hall of fame.
His research has earned recognition for both its academic contributions and practical applications. His work on efficient cloud systems has been deployed on hypervisors at Microsoft Azure, storage systems at Meta, Rubrik and Tencent. Before joining Columbia, Cidon served as the General Manager and Senior Vice President of email protection at Barracuda Networks, where he co-led its email security and archiving business. He joined the company following its acquisition of Sookasa, a cybersecurity startup he co-founded and led as CEO.
Cidon earned his PhD and MS in electrical engineering from Stanford University and his bachelor's degree in computer and software engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
