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"I started my computing career when I was 12 years old in a summer camp promoting programming competition. At that time we didn't have computers at home like now! After I attended several local, then national competitions, my parents used their savings to buy me a computer. No doubt I chose computer science as my major when I entered Fudan University in Shanghai, China. After I finished my BS degree, I continued to pursue my passion in computer science and joined the PhD program at National University of Singapore. There, my PhD advisor suggested I visit his collaborator at Purdue in the U.S. I was a little bit anxious to be far away from home but I applied and started my new journey. After spending three months in the top national security research center at Purdue University, I was exposed to lots of interesting research ideas and fell in love with my work even more, so I decided to come back as a postdoc at Purdue.

Try first and you may like it! Sometimes we just get scared about the terms we hear. We think about computer science as hard, so we step away, and then we miss the chance to see the beauty of this exciting field. So give it a try! I always believe there is no difference between girls and boys working in computer science even though there are very few ladies here. We have to provide more knowledge about computers and science to young girls. During my postdoc I started researching security and privacy. My research extends to security because database management is also involved in security and privacy issues. Now I am an associate professor with my own research lab and a group of talented PhD students. We wanted to do something like a bio authentication, in a privacy preserving way. My research interests cover many areas in spatial temporal databases,
big data processing, and information security in the cloud."

Dan Lin,
Associate professor and St. Clair Fellow, computer science department, Missouri S&T

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