Derya Malak is an Associate Professor (Maître de Conférences, HDR) in the Communication Systems Department at Eurecom, France. She obtained the Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) at the Sorbonne University, Feb. 2026. Previously, she was a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of ECSE at RPI from 2019 to 2021 and a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT from 2017 to 2019. She received her Ph.D. in ECE from the University of Texas at Austin in 2017, a B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering (EEE) with a minor in Physics from Middle East Technical University in 2010, and an M.S. in EEE from Koc University in 2013. Dr. Malak has held visiting positions in INRIA and LINCS, Paris, and at Northeastern University, and summer internships at Huawei, Plano, TX, and Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ. Her expertise is in information theory, communication theory, and networking areas. She has developed novel distributed computation solutions and wireless caching algorithms by capturing the confluence of storage, communication, and computation aspects.
Dr. Malak was awarded the Graduate School fellowship by UT Austin between 2013 and 2017. She was selected to participate in the Rising Stars Workshop for Women in EECS at MIT in 2018. She received the best paper awards in WiOpt 2022 and WiOpt 2023. Her research has been funded by the ANR PEPR, NSF, the Rensselaer-IBM AI Research Collaboration, and the DARPA Dispersive Computing Programs. She is the recipient of the ERC Starting Grant 2023-2028 on computing nonlinear functions over communication networks (SENSIBILITÉ).