People

Shaanan Cohney

Shaanan Cohney

Co-Director, Cybersecurity Center for the Public Good
Assistant Professor, Computer Science

Shaanan Cohney is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Tufts University and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the University of Melbourne. His research sits at the intersection of computer security, privacy, law, and public policy, with a focus on how real-world technical systems interact with legal and institutional constraints. His work has been recognized with major international awards, including an ACM CCS Best Paper Award, an ICSE Distinguished Paper Award, and a Pwnie Award for Best Cryptographic Attack. Shaanan has substantial experience in U.S. technology policy: he was the inaugural Geller Fellow at the Federal Trade Commission's Office of Policy Planning and served as a Cybersecurity Fellow in the office of U.S. Senator Ron Wyden. He earned his Ph.D. and MSE in Computer and Information Science and a Master in Law from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BSc and Diploma of Music from the University of Melbourne and its Conservatorium. His teaching has also received national and university-level awards, including the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia Early Career Teaching Award.

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Daniel Votipka, Lin Family Assistant Professor

Daniel Votipka

Co-Director, Cybersecurity Center for the Public Good
Lin Family Assistant Professor, Computer Science

Daniel Votipka designs clinical programming and supports students at Tufts Cybersecurity Center for Public Good. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and co-director of the Tufts Security and Privacy Lab. He provides expert technical feedback on curriculum and client engagement. His research focuses on computer security, with an emphasis on the human factors affecting security professionals. Previously, he served in several roles at the NSA, conducting security reviews and managing a security operations center.

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Susan Landau, Tufts University

Susan Landau

Research Professor, Department of Computer Science, School of Engineering
Founding Director, Cybersecurity Center for the Public Good
Founding Director, Cybersecurity and Public Policy MS degree

As Bridge Professor of Cyber Security and Policy at the Fletcher School and the School of Engineering, Susan Landau founded the innovative Cybersecurity and Public Policy MS degree program at Tufts University. She then became founding director of the Tufts Cybersecurity Center for the Public Good from inception through September 2026. An interdisciplinary scholar, Landau works at the intersection of privacy, surveillance, cybersecurity, and the law. The author of multiple books and papers, Landau has testified before Congress and frequently briefed US and European policymakers on encryption, surveillance, and cybersecurity issues. She has received the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award, shared with Steven Bellovin and Matt Blaze, the American Mathematical Society's Bertrand Russell Prize. She is a Guggenheim fellow, a fellow of Association for Computing Machinery and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her previous positions include 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. 

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Guannan Wei

Guannan Wei

Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science, School of Engineering

Guannan Wei is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Tufts University and a member of the Tufts Programming Languages group (TuPL). He earned his Ph.D. from Purdue University and was a postdoctoral researcher at INRIA/ENS-PSL in Paris, France. His research focuses on the design and implementation of programming languages, as well as formal methods for analyzing and verifying software systems. He is interested in developing correct-by-construction approaches to improve software security, reliability, and performance, especially in settings where AI plays an increasing role in the reasoning process. His work has been recognized with the Maurice H. Halstead Memorial Award and ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Awards at OOPSLA 2019 and OOPSLA 2024.

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Ming Chow

Ming Chow

Director, Cybersecurity Clinic
Teaching Professor, Department of Computer Science, School of Engineering

Ming Chow directs the Cybersecurity Clinic at Tufts Cybersecurity Center for Public Good. He is an associate teaching professor in the Department of Computer Science, where he has taught Introduction to Security since Spring 2011. He is widely known in the cybersecurity community, having given talks over the last decade at a number of venues including DEF CON, Security Weekly, BSides Boston, and HOPE. Chow was a mentor for over 5 years for the BSides Las Vegas Proving Ground Track. He is a senior member of the Wall of Sheep and Packet Hacking Village at DEF CON. Most recently, Chow was instrumental in the creation of the Cybersecurity Mentorship Program for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts via MassCyberCenter and has been providing live online training sessions on web application security via O'Reilly Media.

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Megumi Ando

Megumi Ando

Minnie McNeal Kenny Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science

Megumi Ando is the Minnie McNeal Kenny Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Tufts University. Prior to joining Tufts, she was a Lead Cybersecurity Research Scientist at the MITRE Corporation, leading independent research projects and serving as a technical consultant for federal agencies, such as the Department of Commerce. Her training in the mathematical foundations of computer science began at MIT where she earned double BS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Mathematics and an MEng degree in EECS. During her tenure at MITRE, she received a fellowship to pursue a PhD in Computer Science at Brown University. She received her PhD in 2020 under the mentorship of Prof. Anna Lysyanskaya (Cryptography) and Prof. Eli Upfal (Probabilistic Methods, Machine Learning). The Ando Lab at Tufts works on the theoretical foundations of anonymous communications.

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Johes Bater

Johes Bater

Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science

Johes Bater is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Tufts University. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Database Group at Duke University, received his PhD in computer science from Northwestern University and completed his BS and MS in electrical engineering at Stanford University. His research centers on how to balance privacy, security, and utility to build fast, accurate database systems that support privacy-preserving analytics with provable security guarantees.

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Jeff Foster, Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science

Jeff Foster

Chair and Professor
Department of Computer Science

Jeff Foster is Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University. He is also the Chair of the Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN). The goal of his research is to develop fundamental new ways to make it easier to build more reliable, secure software. He is interested in programming languages, software engineering, and security. He is a member of Tufts Program Languages (TuPL), and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

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Yingjie Lao

Yingjie Lao

Associate Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department of Computer Science

Yingjie Lao is an Associate Professor in will join the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Tufts University. He was previously an Associate Professor at Clemson University. He received the BS degree from Zhejiang University, China, in 2009, and the PhD degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in 2015. Prior to joining Clemson, he spent one year at Broadcom Corporation. His research has been recognized with an NSF CAREER Award, an IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Very Large Scale Integration Prize Paper Award, and an ISLPED Best Paper Award. His research interests include trusted AI, hardware security, VLSI architectures for machine learning and emerging cryptographic systems, cybersecurity, and robotics.

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Josephine Wolff

Josephine Wolff

Professor of Cybersecurity Policy 
Associate Dean for Research
The Fletcher School

Josephine Wolff designs clinical programming and supports students at Tufts Cybersecurity Center for Public Good. She is a professor of cybersecurity policy at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science. She provides expert feedback regarding compliance with security, privacy, and AI regulations; threat modeling, international risks, and cyber insurance. She is a Fellow in the Atlantic Council Cyber Statecraft Initiative, the New America Cybersecurity Initiative, and Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. 

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