Rate My Professor Natasha Fernandes

Dr. Natasha Fernandes is a Senior Lecturer in Cyber Security in the School of Computing at Macquarie University, part of the Faculty of Science and Engineering. She earned her PhD in Computing from Macquarie University and École Polytechnique in France in 2021, with a thesis titled 'Differential Privacy for Metric Spaces: Information-Theoretic Models for Privacy and Utility with New Applications to Metric Domains.' She also holds a Masters of Research in Computing, awarded with a University Medal in 2017 from Macquarie University, based on her thesis 'A Novel Framework for Author Obfuscation using Generalised Differential Privacy,' and a BSc in Pure Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Sydney in 1997. Before returning to academia, Fernandes worked in industry as Lead Engineer in the Data Engineering Team at Yahoo!7 from 2012 to 2015, where she scoped and delivered a semantic web publishing platform and implemented NLP pipelines, and as Senior Software Engineer in the Media Engineering Team from 2008 to 2011, contributing to projects like Plus7 catch-up TV and major event websites.

Fernandes' research centers on the mathematical foundations of data privacy, specializing in differential privacy, metric differential privacy, quantitative information flow techniques derived from information theory, and privacy-preserving mechanisms for natural language processing and machine learning. Her notable publications include 'Generalised differential privacy for text document processing' (2019), 'Explaining ε in local differential privacy through the lens of quantitative information flow' (2024), 'Universal optimality and robust utility bounds for metric differential privacy' (2023), 'Locality sensitive hashing with extended differential privacy' (2021), and 'How to develop an intuition for risk... and other invisible phenomena' (2022). She has received the John Makepeace Bennett Award for the best Computing PhD dissertation in Australia and New Zealand (2022), the Faculty of Science and Engineering Excellence in HDR Award (2021), Vice-Chancellor’s Commendation for PhD Dissertation (2021), HDR Rising Star Award (2021), Cyber Security MRes Computing Prize for Academic Excellence (2017), and University Medal for Computing (2018). Fernandes teaches units such as Offensive Security, Secure Applications Development, and Digital Forensics, and affiliates with the Data Horizons Research Centre, Future Communications Research Centre, and FinTech and Banking Research Centre. Her work develops mathematical principles and software tools to analyze and enhance privacy in secure systems.