Ni Trieu

Ni Trieu immersed herself in work with Arizona State University well before arriving in Tempe. Earlier this summer, she joined a new National Science Foundation Rapid Response Research project at the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering to better employ mobile digital technology in the battle against COVID-19.

“I have been working actively on contact tracing, and especially on how to mitigate cryptographic attacks against existing systems,” she says. “This effort will help convince people to use disease contact tracing tools without concerns about privacy.”

As Trieu now moves into her faculty role at the university, she wants to continue research that applies cryptography to address real-world problems. Her goal is to develop new theories and protocols that can radically change the performance of practical systems.

During the coming academic year, Trieu will also be taking her expertise into the classroom to teach CSE 539: Applied Cryptography. Students will learn how popular cryptographic protocols work and how to apply them in the real world.

“For example,” Trieu says, “they will discover how to encrypt emails and send them securely over the internet without revealing their content to eavesdroppers.”

The ability to engage in this innovative work was Trieu’s inspiration to join ASU, which she acknowledges as a center for some of the world’s top engineering programs.

“The School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering has an outstanding cybersecurity team with many young, energetic and talented faculty members,” she says. “And the Biodesign Institute is another important motivation to come here because one of my main research interests is secure bio-computing. But across all of ASU, I really value the culture of collaborative research.”

When Trieu is not advancing the field of computer science, she expresses her physical self through badminton, table tennis and hiking.