Rate My Professor Dinusha Vatsalan

Dr. Dinusha Vatsalan is a Senior Lecturer in Cyber Security in the School of Computing within the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Macquarie University, where she joined in May 2022 and holds an honorary senior lecturer position. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from the Australian National University in 2014, focusing on scalable and approximate privacy-preserving record linkage under supervisors Prof. Peter Christen, A/Prof. Vassilios S. Verykios, and Dr. Lexing Xie. Prior to this, she obtained a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Information and Communication Technology from the University of Colombo School of Computing in 2009, graduating first class with a GPA of 3.76. Her career includes serving as Research Scientist at Data61, CSIRO from April 2017 to May 2022; Research Fellow, Research Assistant, and Tutor at the Australian National University from 2012 to 2017; and Instructor at the University of Colombo School of Computing from 2009 to 2010. Currently, she is Senior Lecturer Higher Grade in IT at the Northern University of Sri Lanka in the Faculty of Engineering and IT since August 2025.

Dr. Vatsalan's research specializes in privacy-preserving technologies for data matching, record linkage, data mining, machine learning, data sharing, privacy risk quantification, and defenses against attacks on machine learning models. She has authored over 60 scientific articles, including highly cited works such as 'Privacy-preserving record linkage for big data: current approaches and research challenges' (2017), 'Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning Based Record Linkage' in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2024), 'Privacy risk quantification in education data using Markov model' in British Journal of Educational Technology (2022), and book chapters like 'Privacy-Preserving Record Linkage' in Springer Encyclopedia of Big Data Technologies (2019). Her contributions appear in prestigious venues including IEEE TKDE, IEEE TIFS, and ACM conferences. She has received major awards including the Australian Government’s Endeavour Postgraduate Research Award, Ruby Payne-Scott Award and Women in Science Career Award from CSIRO, Data61 Research Plus PhD Scholarship, Australia-Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme grant, and Best Student Paper Award at ITNAC 2020. At Macquarie University, she teaches units such as COMP6013 Introduction to Cyber Security, COMP6310 Digital Forensics, COMP8220 Machine Learning, and COMP6325 Cyber Security Management in Practice. Her work advances privacy-preserving techniques for big data and cyber-physical systems, contributing to secure data analytics and AI model robustness.