Introduction
Dr. Heng Xu is a tenured associate professor of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University where she is a recipient of the endowed PNC Technologies Career Development Professorship. 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. She is also the associate director of the Center for Cyber-Security, Information Privacy and Trust (LIONS Center) at Penn State.
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 individuals' information privacy concerns and behaviors, strategic management of organizational privacy and security practices, and design and empirical evaluations of privacy-enhancing technologies. At Penn State, she teaches courses on security and risk analysis, integration of privacy and security, human information behavior, and organizational informatics. Her interdisciplinary research and education have been sponsored by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and National Security Agency.
Dr. Xu has been granted a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, which is the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.
Dr. Xu has authored over 50 research papers on information privacy, security management, human-computer interaction, and technology innovation adoption. Her research has appeared in Decision Support Systems, Information Systems Research, Information & Management, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, and in other journals. Her interdisciplinary privacy research has been recently featured in the Wall Street Journal Digits, on the Kathleen Dunn Show that airs live on Wisconsin Public Radio, and on TV Show - To the Best of My Knowledge that airs live in Central Pennsylvania.