Hi! I’m Lucas. I grew up in the Chicagoland area and went to school at the University of Illinois– Urbana Champaign (UIUC) where I graduated with a B.S. in computer engineering in 2019. UIUC has always been a top-5 school, and as of 2019 has been ranked #3 in CompE according to U.S News college ranking. I am very proud of where I came from and will talk your ear off about it.
During my undergrad I loved anything and everything security, where I was an avid bug bounty hunter (through which I paid a couple months rent once!) and did hardware security research under Chris Fletcher. I am published* and have done offensive research on CPU side-channels under him. I was also a TA for ECE411 in Spring 2019, the capstone processor design course at UIUC.
I am currently at Qualcomm after Nuvia was acquired. Prior to that I was at SiFive where I was building out the security verification infrastructure.
Lately as of 2024 interests primarily lie in better tooling and infrastructure to impact the archaic practices of the semiconductor space.
* Paper also recognized in IEEE Micro Top Picks Special Issue, 2020
More about me
Favorite activity/ies: Hiking, reading, video games
Favorite book(s): A Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde; Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
My proudest moment: Technically, I would say a tie between my first paper acceptance, and the first bug bounty I achieved. Non-technically, when I ran a marathon in 3:36.
Fun Fact: I can move my ears. I have only met 2 other people that could do that.
Other random interests: Video game speedruns, cooking, rock climbing, wine, podcasts, door design