Saksham Agarwal

Professor Saksham Agarwal is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research lies at the intersection of networking, systems, and hardware, with a focus on rethinking how modern networks interact with hosts, operating systems, and hardware accelerators. His work explores how bottlenecks and inefficiencies arise across the full networking stack—from applications and OS kernels to NICs and emerging hardware interfaces—and how co-design across these layers can significantly improve performance, efficiency, and reliability. He has published extensively at top-tier systems and networking venues such as SIGCOMM, NSDI, OSDI, SOSP, ASPLOS, MICRO, and HotNets, with multiple best paper awards and recognitions. His research has been recognized with the ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award, Google Research Scholar Award, and other honors. He welcomes motivated students interested in systems, networking, and hardware–software co-design.