Bio

Dr. Danfeng (Daphne) Yao is the Department Head and a Professor of Computer Science at NC State. Her research spans across cybersecurity and AI digital health, with a shared focus on accuracy and deployment. Her recent work, which highlights the low responsiveness of learning-based disease prediction models, has been widely reported by the media. Dr. Yao’s patents on anomaly detection are extremely influential in the industry, cited by patents from major cybersecurity firms and technology companies, including FireEye, Symantec, Qualcomm, Cisco, IBM, SAP, Boeing, and Palo Alto Networks. Dr. Yao is an AAAS Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. She is a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. Previously, she received the NSF CAREER Award and ARO Young Investigator Award.

Dr. Yao is an active and long-time leader in her professional cybersecurity research community. She is the Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control (SIGSAC) and has been serving on the SIGSAC executive committee since 2017. At Virginia Tech College of Engineering, she served important leadership roles, including the Interim Head of the Computer Science (CS) Department and the Chair of the CS Department’s Personnel Committee overseeing faculty promotion, tenure, and annual review, across two campuses (Blacksburg and the Innovation Campus in the National Capital Region). Dr. Yao made significant contributions to the growth and retention of the Virginia Tech CS Department’s faculty team and the college’s Tech-talent Pipeline Initiative sponsored by the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Dr. Yao received her Ph.D. degree from Brown University (Computer Science), M.S. degrees from Princeton University (Chemistry) and Indiana University (Computer Science), Bloomington, and a B.S. degree from Peking University in China (Chemistry).

Area(s) of Expertise

Cybersecurity
Program Analysis
Machine Learning
Algorithms
Applied Cryptography