The School of Computing would like to welcome in two new faculty members coming in for the Fall 2026 semester and another faculty member coming in the Fall 2027 semester. Below you can read a bit about each of our newest faculty members and please give them a warm welcome to our campus!  

Zion Leonahenahe Basque is one of our newest Assistant Professors at the University of Georgia. His research focuses on program analysis, reverse engineering, and AI-driven software security. He led Team Shellphish’s autonomous patching effort in DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), where the team earned more than $3 million for building systems that autonomously discovered and repaired vulnerabilities in real-world software. His work has appeared at top-tier security conferences and is widely used as open-source security software. Outside of research, he competes with Shellphish, the oldest ethical hacking team in the U.S., that participates in 48-hour cybersecurity competitions where research becomes practice and technical skill becomes sport.

Yu Wang is also one of our newest Assistant Professors in the School of Computing and Institute of AI at the University of Georgia. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University at 2024 and served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon between 2024 and 2026. He directs the Knowledge Intelligence for Discovery and Decision-Making lab, which conducts research in machine learning, Agentic AI (LLMs), and (Graph-)Structured Data, with a particular interest in how to leverage agentic intelligence to reason over structured knowledge and how to leverage structured intelligence to manage agentic processing. His publications span top venues such as NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, ACL, WWW, and NAACL. He has received multiple honors, including the ACM SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Honorable Mention Award (2026), Best Paper at NeurIPS GLFrontiers (2023).

Wentao Guo will be an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Georgia starting Fall 2027. As a human-centered researcher, Wentao evaluates real-world challenges in computer security and privacy in order to design practical solutions. Much of his work focuses on the mental models, processes, and needs of practitioners such as software developers and scientists, who have disproportionate impacts on the security and privacy of ordinary users. Here are just some of the research directions Wentao Guo is excited about: Supporting social, behavioral, and health scientists with disclosure avoidance when publishing data. Evaluating outcomes of cybersecurity professional programs. Reducing the burden on end users to protect themselves from scams. Exploring nascent efforts to support healthy use of personal technology (e.g., dumbphones, Luddite Clubs, social media bans).