Tanusree Sharma is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University. Her research focus is on the intersections of usable security and privacy, AI governance, and Blockchain. Tanusree’s research will center on addressing emerging privacy and security issues with a particular emphasis on understanding the needs, expectations, and concerns of marginalized and underserved communities and developing solutions grounded in empirical evidence.  

Tanusree earned her Ph.D. in Informatics from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in July 2024. Her research interest has broadened to privacy in personal data sharing during her time as a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute of Security and Privacy in 2022 and organizational privacy controls during her time at Google in 2021. In 2023, she expanded her research focus to identity management in democratic systems and AI, supported by a grant from OpenAI. 

Her contributions to the usable security community have recently been recognized with the prestigious John Karat Usable Security Award in 2024. Her research has also received the CHI 2024 Best Paper Honorable Mention Award and the “Democratic Inputs to AI” award from OpenAI. Her works have also been highlighted by Forbes, Meta, OpenAI blog, Crypto.news. 

She serves as a program committee and organizer/steering committee member for prominent HCI and security conferences, including ACM CHI, ACM CSCW, and SOUPS.