Dr. Heng Xu is an assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. She leads the Privacy Assurance Lab (PAL), an inter-disciplinary research group working on a diverse set of projects related to understanding and assuring information privacy. Her current research focus is on the interplay between social and technological issues associated with information privacy. She approaches privacy issues through a combination of empirical, theoretical and technical research efforts. Her research projects have been dealing with impacts of novel technologies on individuals' privacy perceptions, strategic management of firms' information privacy practices, and design and empirical evaluations of privacy-enhancing technologies. Her research in some of these areas has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Xu has published articles and book chapters on information
privacy, trust, human-computer interaction, and technology innovation
adoption. She received her Ph.D. in information systems from the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore in December 2005. Her Ph.D.
dissertation on Privacy Considerations in the Location Based Services was a runner up for the 2006
ACM SIGMIS Doctoral Dissertation Award Competition.