Portrait of Mingming ChenMingming Chen

Assistant Professor

Contact information

2166 Engineering Hall
mingc@k-state.edu
Personal website

Education

  • Ph.D., Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, 2025
  • M.E., Information and Communication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, 2016
  • B.E., Communication Engineering, North China Institute of Science and Technology, 2012

Professional experience

Mingming Chen received her doctorate in computer science and engineering from The Pennsylvania State University in 2025. She also holds a Master of Engineering in information and communication engineering from the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, where she graduated as an outstanding graduate in 2016, and a Bachelor of Engineering in communication engineering from the North China Institute of Science and Technology in 2012.

Before joining Kansas State, Chen worked on research collaborations at the Army Research Laboratory, focusing on deception and defense in networked systems during her doctoral studies at Penn State. Prior to her doctoral work, she gained industry and applied research experience at the Tongji–Yale Joint Laboratory, Cisco Systems in Beijing and the China Academy of Information and Communication Technology.

Research

Chen’s research interests lie in network and systems security, with an emphasis on software-defined networking (SDN) security, programmable data plane and security-driven coordination in distributed systems. Her work explores how to build secure and adaptive network infrastructures by combining programmability with security guarantees and optimization.

Her current interests include applying SDN in smart agriculture, ensuring privacy and security in next-generation network slicing and leveraging the centralized control plane architecture of SDN to mitigate vulnerabilities inherent in its design.

Academic Highlights

Chen has published in leading security venues such as ACM CCS and USENIX Security, and her doctoral research was presented at the ACM CCS Doctoral Symposium. She has contributed to the research community as a program committee member for SafeThings 2025 and an artifact evaluation committee member for USENIX Security 2025. She has served as a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Networking, IEEE Security & Privacy, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, INFOCOM, and IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management. Chen contributed to the OpenDaylight BGP Labeled Unicast project, was an invited speaker at the OpenDaylight Summit and received the ODL Chinese Community Contribution Award in 2015. Her vulnerability disclosures have been assigned CVE identifiers CVE-2024-37018, CVE-2024-46942 and CVE-2024-46943, all classified as critical.