Nik Sultana
Photo credit: JMS

Nik Sultana, PhD

Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Illinois Institute of Technology

Contact: nsultana1 at(symbol) illinoistech dot edu

CV GitLab (Group) GitLab (Self) GitHub

Research interests: My research studies and advances the performance, observability, and security of data networks used in scientific infrastructure. To that end, I am currently developing a trustworthy technique that relies on automated reasoning and formal methods. I also collaborate closely with practitioners and students to build and evaluate functional artifacts, with a special focus on strengthening community infrastructure.

Background: Before joining Illinois Tech I was a postdoc at the UPenn Distributed Systems Lab and at the Cambridge Systems Research Group. Up to my PhD I did theoretical research, then I shifted to systems research. For my PhD I developed a compiler-based approach to proof translation, and before that I worked on constructive proof search and the verification of refactorings using interactive theorem-proving. I did my undergrad at the University of Malta.

Current Focus

Research: Patchwork and CREASE

Teaching: Advanced Computer Security

Previously: Intro to Parallel and Distributed Computing and Data Communication

(External) Service: I currently serve on the PC (Technical) Program Committee or OC Organizing Committee of the following:

  • EuroSys 2027 (Spring deadline: May 7) (deadline passed) (Fall deadline: September 24) (deadline passed)
  • SIGCOMM Education Workshop 2026 (deadline: June 7) (deadline passed)
  • International Workshop on Innovating the Network for Data-Intensive Science (INDIS 2026) (deadline: August 3) (deadline passed)
    New this year: Student track (deadline: June 10) (deadline passed)
  • EuroP4 2026 (deadline: August 17) (deadline passed)

Research Opportunities

If you're an Illinois Tech student, check out my page on BS/MS student projects related to my research.
Regardless of whether you're currently an Illinois Tech student, you can find out more about funded PhD opportunities related to my research. You can find out more about my research by browsing this homepage.

Resources

I created and curate these resources for IIT students (and soon-to-be IIT students):

Recent Activities

  • September 2026. The Dashboard is one year old! See this post that describes the Dashboard's overhaul.
  • April 2026. FABRIC Awards: Honored to receive the award for best classroom use of the FABRIC infrastructure, and additionally for Alexander and the CREASE team to receive the award for best "matrix" (project).
  • April 2026. CREASE is featured in FABRIC's Tips & Tricks blog!
  • March 2026. Honored to receive the College-level award for Excellence in Research at the junior level, by a College of Computing Assistant Professor.
  • February 2026. Honored to be invited to speak on a panel as part of the URA's Council of Presidents Annual Meeting and Policy Forum. My input related to my group's VSP-enabled research and collaboration in the Dept of Energy's ecosystem.
    • Slide from the URA Council of Presidents panel (full size)
    • Second slide from the URA Council of Presidents panel (full size)
  • December 2025. Alexander presented our paper at CSET'25, about a novel user experiment that was carried out on FABRIC (to study a new tool that he's building). Kudos to the whole team!
  • November 2025. INDIS and SC25 were very busy but very interesting. One of my highlights was our demo at the DoE booth — kudos to the multi-institutional team.
    • Alexander at SC25 (full size)
    • The SCinet NOC at SC25 (full size)
    • Equipment racks in the SCinet NOC at SC25 (full size)
    • Monitoring display in the SCinet NOC at SC25 (full size)
    • The IIT, Fermilab, ESnet and NERSC demo at the DoE booth at SC25 (full size)
    • Animated visualisation from the IIT, Fermilab, ESnet and NERSC demo
  • November 2025. Honored to become a FABRIC Ambassador! I thank the FABRIC project and the research community for making this possible!
  • October 2025. The Patchwork paper received the Community Contribution Award at IMC'25! Well-deserved congrats to the whole team, and a huge thank you to our research community for this recognition!
    • Receiving the Community Contribution Award for Patchwork at IMC'25 (full size)
    • The Patchwork talk at IMC'25 (full size)
  • October 2025. We presented an interactive tutorial on Patchwork and another on CREASE at KNIT11. Huge kudos to Nishanth and Alexander. The tutorial materials and recordings can be accessed from the project sites.
    • Alexander demonstrating CREASE at KNIT11 (full size)
    • Alexander giving a one-minute talk at KNIT11 (full size)
    • Nishanth running the Patchwork tutorial at KNIT11 (full size)
Click for older news

Selected Publications

The full list of my academic publications is indexed at DBLP and Google Scholar.

Research Projects & System Releases

Acknowledgement for research funding/support: NSF, DARPA, Fermilab, Google, RES-MATCH, URA, XUP (AUP).
I'm also very grateful to the FABRIC, Chameleon, and SPHERE testbeds for enabling some of my group's work.
I am lead PI of the CREASE project.

Adoption: CREASE has been integrated with FABRIC and featured in its Tips & Tricks blog. Patchwork is regularly used for teaching and to populate a dashboard (for over a year!). Caper is deployed as part of BPF Exam at tcpdump.org. Bridging research and teaching, our SmartNIC tutorial (evolved from Fall'23 CS595 course materials) was adapted into documentation of the ESnet P4 workflow for FABRIC.

Theme: My current research theme is observability and network transparency as captured by the CREASE, Patchwork and Caper projects. My previous theme was semantics-preserving decomposition as captured by Flightplan and Pitchfork.

Projects:

Smaller systems:

Group

Group members (including BS and MS students) have authored and presented papers, posters, and demos, and received recognition for their work — including through the IMC Community Contribution Award, HPEC Outstanding Short Paper, INDIS best demo, FABRIC community awards, CRA honorable mentions, and several university-level awards. Several past undergraduate mentees have joined PhD programs, including at UIUC, Penn, Arizona and Princeton.

Members of the group

At Illinois Tech, I'm currently working with:

See my page on funded opportunities for a PhD in Computer Science related to my research.

If you're already at Illinois Tech, I'm happy to discuss undergrad (CS49{1,7}) and MS (CS59{1,7}) projects. Also see my current list of student projects.

Previously, at Illinois Tech I worked with Neil Dhote, Xue Zhang, Rigden Atsatsang, Mohamad Dib Fares, Luis Casarrubios Elez, Cyprien Gueyraud, Simrat Kaur, Irina Klein, Shivam Patel, H. E. Greenblatt, Mohammad Firas Sada, Aditi Kumar, Marelle León, Willow Carlson-Huber, Leelavathi Raja, Hyunsuk Bang, Alberto Perez Bogantes, Sean Cummings, Pilar Fernandez Gayol, Vaneshi Ramdhony, Nishanth Shyamkumar, Laura Serrano Velazquez, Prajwal Somendyapanahalli Venkateshmurthy, Lucas Ferguson, Bjoern Sagstad, Tyree Speers, and Van Anderson.

Earlier, at the University of Pennsylvania I worked with the following Research Assistants: Achala Rao, Zihao Jin (visiting from Tsinghua University), Anirudh Chelluri, Nishanth Prabhu, Shilpi Bose, Henry Zhu, Ke Zhong (visiting from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, now a PhD student at Penn), Zhaoyang Han, Ruijie Mao, Digvijaysinh Chauhan, Nishanth Shyamkumar, Shivani Burad, Zhilei Zheng, Garvit Khandelwal, Ritvik Sadana, Rakesh Nagda, Heena Nagda (from Georgia Tech), Stephen Carrasquillo, Junyong Zhao, Saket, Andrew Zhao, and Aishwarya Wesanekar.

And before that, at the University of Cambridge I supervised Jonny Shipton's 2016 UROP (research internship) and the "Part II" (undergrad dissertation) projects of Thomas Le Feuvre, Radu Voroneanu (co-supervised with Lucas Dixon), Daniel Spencer (co-supervised with Richard Mortier), and Rupert Horlick (co-supervised with Richard Mortier).

Teaching

In 2026, I received the award for best classroom use of the FABRIC infrastructure. In 2025, I co-authored a paper at SIGCSE'25 with my TA's on using FABRIC to teach networking. In 2024, my group produced a SmartNIC tutorial (evolved from Fall'23 CS595 materials) that was adapted into documentation of the ESnet P4 workflow for FABRIC. In 2021, I initiated a project to develop a teaching and demo platform and mentored a student who developed it and presented a demo at SIGCSE 2021.

Students who take project-heavy courses I teach (such as CS543 or CS595) are encouraged to author a blog post, poster, or give a demo locally and at a conference.

I prepared fresh teaching materials, including notes, exercises, and demos for most courses shown below. For recent examples, see the course pages for Introduction to Parallel and Distributed Computing and for Data Communication.

Videos (Demos/Talks)