Susan Landau

Susan Landau is Professor of Cyber Security and Policy in the Department of Computer Science, Tufts University. Earlier, as Bridge Professor of Cyber Security and Policy at the Fletcher School and School of Engineering, she founded Tufts's innovative MS degree in Cybersecurity and Public Policy. Prior to Tufts, Landau was Senior Staff Privacy Analyst at Google, Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and faculty member at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Wesleyan University.

An interdisciplinary scholar, Landau works at the intersection of privacy, surveillance, cybersecurity, and the law. She has testified before Congress and briefed US and European policymakers on encryption, Landau and Whitfield Diffie won the McGannon Book Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communication Policy Research for Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption. She received the Surveillance Studies Book Prize for Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies, the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award, shared with Steven Bellovin and Matt Blaze, and the American Mathematical Society's Bertrand Russell Prize. Landau has served on committees of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, on the National Science Foundation Computer and Information Science Engineering Advisory Board, the National Institute of Standards and Technology Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board, and on mathematics and computer science journal editorial boards. Landau received her BA from Princeton, MS from Cornell, and PhD from MIT.

Landau is strongly committed to the success of women and members of underrepresented groups in science. She currently serves on the External Advisory Board for the Spelman College program in cyber security and policy. Her previous activities have included co-creating the graduate student GREPSEC workshops in privacy and security for women and members of underrepresented groups, conceiving of and co-creating the ACM Athena Lectureship, which honors senior women researchers, starting researcHers, a mailing list for women computer science researchers in academia, industry and government labs and co-organizing the first MIT Celebration of Women in Math meeting. Landau received the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award from the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.