He received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012, and was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Texas at Austin before joining UMass. Amir's area of research is network security and privacy, which includes problems such as Internet censorship resistance, statistical traffic analysis, location privacy, cover communications, and privacy in next-generation network architectures. Amir has received several awards including the Best Practical Paper award at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland) in 2013, a Google Faculty Research Award in 2015, and an NSF CAREER Award in 2016.