Dr. Dan Lin is a tenured full professor and director of I-Privacy Lab in Department of Computer Science. Before joining Vanderbilt, she was a tenured associate professor with joint appointments at EECS Department and Management Department at University of Missouri. Prior to that, she was the associate chair for graduate study and director of cybersecurity lab at CS Department of Missouri University of Science and Technology. She was a postdoctoral research associate at Purdue University working with Prof. Elisa Bertino from 2006 to 2008. She obtained her Ph.D. from National University of Singapore under the supervision of Prof. Beng Chin Ooi. During her PhD study, she visited Aalborg University in Denmark and worked with Prof. Christian S. Jensen for three months.
Her main research interests cover many areas in the fields of database systems and information security. Her current research includes big data processing, security and privacy in cloud computing, privacy preservation in social networking, location privacy in mobile applications, routing and security issues in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). She has served as program committee members in a number of premium conferences such as SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, ICDCS and SSTD. She is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing (TETC), ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS). She also serves as the secretary of IEEE Publication Board. [Google Scholar]
Her total research funding is around $12M, sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF), National Security Agency (NSA), and Department of Education (DoE). Majority of her funded research projects are in the field of Cybersecurity and Privacy. She is the Principle Investigator of NSF Scholarship for Service Program which is a $3.5M project focusing on training PhD and MS students in cybersecurity. She received Outstanding Achievement Award in 2014 and Faculty Research Award in 2015. She was named 2015 Woman of the Year by Missouri S&T, and Rober H. Buescher Faculty Fellow in 2021 and Richard Hoft Faculty Fellow in 2022 by University of Missouri. She is the recipient of 2024 IEEE Big Data Security Senior Research award.
In addition, she is also very active in organizing student events and outreach activities. To mention a few, she established IEEE-CS student branch and received IEEE St. Louis Section Outstanding Branch Counselor award consecutively in 2009 and 2010. She revived ACM-W (Women in Computing) student branch and had served as the faculty adviser for 5 years. She organized workshops for 7-8 grade girls under the Expanding Your Horizon program for about 5 years. She is also the program director of GenCyber security summer camp for K-12 teachers sponsored by NSF/NSA. The teacher camps were successfully held for 5 times already.