Elisa Bertino receives the inaugural Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia International Award
02-12-2024
Purdue CS professor earns prestigious award for excellence in research and gender equality leadership
Named after the first woman to receive a doctoral degree in Padua and in the modern world (1678), the award celebrates the contribution of women scientists and scholars to research, innovation, and the development and dissemination of an increasingly equal scientific culture.
Elisa Bertino, Samuel D. Conte Professor of Computer Science and Research Director at Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) received the award for sustained excellence in many research areas in the discipline of computer science, including information security and database systems, and a commitment to correct its gender imbalance.
The award, established by IIC New York, ISSNAF and the Elena Cornaro Center is intended for women scientists of Italian citizenship who work in the US and have distinguished themselves for excellence in research, for continuity of commitment, for vision and leadership, for the impact of their findings on the international community.
Bertino's research interests cover many areas in the fields of information security and database systems. Her research combines both theoretical and practical aspects, addressing applications on a number of domains, such as medicine and humanities. Her current research includes: access control systems, secure publishing techniques and secure broadcast for XML data; advanced RBAC models and foundations of access control models; trust negotiation languages and privacy; data mining and security; multi-strategy filtering systems for Web pages and sites; security for grid computing systems; integration of virtual reality techniques and databases; and geographical information systems and spatial databases. She is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM. She received the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement award in 2002 for outstanding contributions to database systems and database security and advanced data management systems, and received the 2005 Tsutomu Kanai Award by the IEEE Computer Society for pioneering and innovative research contributions to secure distributed systems.
About the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University
Founded in 1962, the Department of Computer Science was created to be an innovative base of knowledge in the emerging field of computing as the first degree-awarding program in the United States. The department continues to advance the computer science industry through research. US News & Reports ranks Purdue CS #20 and #18 overall in graduate and undergraduate programs respectively, 6th in cybersecurity, 8th in software engineering, 13th in programming languages and systems, 15th in data analytics, and 18th in theory. Graduates of the program are able to solve complex and challenging problems in many fields. Our consistent success in an ever-changing landscape is reflected in the record undergraduate enrollment, increased faculty hiring, innovative research projects, and the creation of new academic programs. The increasing centrality of computer science in academic disciplines and society, and new research activities - centered around data science, artificial intelligence, programming languages, theoretical computer science, machine learning, and cybersecurity - are the future focus of the department. cs.purdue.edu
Writer: Emily Kinsell, emily@purdue.edu