Picture of Kentrell Owens, a handsome young man, presenting a poster at a conference

Kentrell Owens

PhD Student (2020 - present)

Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington, USA
[my first name]@cs.washington.edu
[CV under construction]

My pronouns are he/him.
Twitter: @KentrellOwens
Mastodon: @kentrellowens

About Me

I'm a third year PhD student at the University of Washington in the Security & Privacy Research Lab. My advisors are Franziska Roesner and Tadayoshi Kohno. My research area is computer security and privacy. My research interests include usable security and privacy, mobile/IoT security and privacy, and web security and privacy. I'm specifically interested in the computer security and privacy needs of underserved communities.

I earned my M.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA) where I worked with Lorrie Cranor, and my B.S. from Rice University (Houston, TX). I grew up in rural northern Louisiana, and I'm a first-generation college student. I owe the victories in my life to all the investments my friends, family, teachers, and communities have made in me. If you're reading this, you might be one of those people; thank you!

Updates

09/12/2022 - Last month I returned from spending a summer in Kolkata, West Bengal, India, studying Bangla (aka Bengali, the 7th most spoken language in the world) on a Critical Language Scholarship. It was a great experience, and my Bangla has significantly improved! I recently presented our work at USENIX Security in Boston, attended the Tapia Conference in DC, and at the end of the month I'm going to Germany to present at EuroUSEC. Lots of travel ahead!

05/14/2022 - I passed my Qualifying Examination! This is the first of three major milestones in my PhD, and I'm glad to have made it through the first.

01/20/2022 - Our paper on the risks of electronic monitoring smartphone applications was (conditionally) accepted into USENIX Security 2022! More details to come soon!

Publications

2022

2021

2020

2019

Last updated September 2022.