George Candea heads the Dependable Systems Lab, where he develops techniques and abstractions for building efficient and trustworthy computer systems. His current work focuses on making performance and energy programmable, i.e., providing first-class abstractions to capture a system’s performance and energy behavior (as interfaces do for functionality) and to use them dependably to design, code, and operate efficient systems.

In the recent past, George also served as CEO and later Chief Scientist of Cyberhaven, a cybersecurity company he co-founded in 2016 with four of his PhD students. Earlier, he was CTO and then Chief Scientist of Aster Data Systems (now Teradata Vantage), a big-data company he co-founded in 2005 with two Stanford colleagues. Before that, he held positions at Oracle, Microsoft Research, and IBM Research.

George is an ACM Fellow (2025) and recipient of the Mark Weiser Award (2024), the inaugural Eurosys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award (2014), the MIT TR35 Young Innovators award (2005), and several Best Paper awards. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science (2005) from Stanford University and a B.S. (1997) and M.Eng. (1998) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.