Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 Honoree
2026
Associate Professor
University of Toronto
Dr. Nicolas Papernot is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Department of Computer Science, and the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. He also holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute and is a Co-Director of the Canadian AI Safety Institute (CAISI) Research Program at CIFAR.
With his colleagues, he demonstrated the first real-world black-box attacks on deep neural networks in 2015. Earlier this year, his group demonstrated that progress in agentic AI enables a new class of computer worms, malware that propagates on a computer network without human intervention.
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