Susan Landau

Landau graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, where in 1972 she was a finalist in the national Westinghouse Science Talent Search. For her project, she used number theory to try to determine what characteristics an odd perfect number might have (all known perfect numbers are even, but odd perfect numbers are theoretically possible). She earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics at Princeton University and went on to earn an MS at Cornell University and a PhD in computer science at MIT. From 1983 to 1991, she was an assistant professor of computer science at Wesleyan University; during that period she also completed a postdoctoral appointment at Yale and held visiting faculty positions at Yale and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, Calif. Her research at that time focused on algebraic algorithms, and she developed a number of polynomial-time algorithms that have applications in symbolic computation, cryptography, and computational geometry. She was a research associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst before joining Sun Microsystems as senior staff engineer in 1999, becoming a distinguished engineer in 2005. At Sun, she worked with chief technology officer Greg Papadopoulos to establish the company's principle's on digital rights management (DRM). WPI announced in 2014 that Susan Landau, PhD, former senior staff privacy analyst at Google and a widely respected authority on cybersecurity, privacy, and public policy, would join the WPI faculty as a pr ofessor of cybersecurity policy. Landau's position, which includes a joint appointment in the departments of Social Science and Policy Studies and Computer Science,was effective July 1 2014. BA, Princeton University, 1976 MS, Cornell University, 1979 PhD, MIT, 1983