Bio

Leon Moonen is a Research Professor at Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo, Norway, where he heads the Secure and Trustworthy Intelligent Systems (SENTRY) department. He is also Head of AI Security at Simula’s Centre for AI Security and Safety (CAISS). His research investigates the interplay between artificial intelligence and software engineering, with a focus on security. A central theme is AI security: how AI systems can be attacked, misled, or exploited, and how to make them more robust and trustworthy. This includes red-teaming and adversarial evaluation of large language models (LLMs), auditing and hardening of AI components with techniques from program analysis, such as fuzzing and information-flow analysis, and monitoring and control of AI agents at runtime. Conversely, his group uses AI to make software more secure and resilient. His research combines several fields, such as statistical program analysis, machine learning, software repository mining, cybersecurity, and empirical software engineering.

Leon prefers to work in close collaboration with industry and the public sector, to ensure that his research addresses questions of practical value, and to evaluate candidate solutions in real-life circumstances. Current projects investigate LLM-based detection and repair of bugs and security vulnerabilities in code, knowledge graphs and LLMs for cyber threat intelligence, adaptive bio-inspired techniques for creating autonomously self-healing systems, red-teaming and adversarial robustness of LLMs, and analysis of large-scale logging data for anomaly detection and incident response. Through CAISS, he contributes to evaluations of the security of AI systems that become part of national infrastructure, and to evidence-based advice to Norwegian authorities on AI risk in critical systems.

Dr. Moonen has published over 150 scientific papers (over 8300 citations, h-index: 39, i10-index: 87) and serves on steering-, organizing-, and program committees of international conferences on software maintenance (ICSM/ICSME), reverse engineering (WCRE), program understanding (ICPC), source code analysis (SCAM), software analysis, evolution and reengineering (SANER), and the foundations of software engineering (ESEC/FSE). He was general chair of SCAM 2023 and has (co-)organized various workshops on topics related to these areas. His work received three Most Influential Paper awards (WCRE 2011 and 2012, SANER 2023), and artifact awards at SEAMS 2023 and ICSME 2024. Before moving to Simula, he was an assistant professor of Software Engineering at Delft University of Technology where he taught courses on software evolution and software architecture. He is/has been advisor to 16 PhD students (4 ongoing), 11 Post-docs (2 ongoing) and 30 MSc students. He is co-founder of the Software Improvement Group, a spin-off of his PhD research that specializes in the use of source code analysis to help organizations get control over their software systems. Dr Moonen received his MSc (cum laude, Computer Science, 1996) and PhD (Computer Science, 2002) from the University of Amsterdam. He is a member of ACM and IEEE Computer Society.

(October 2026)