Susan Landau is Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Before joining Sun, she was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University, and held visiting positions at Yale,Cornell, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley.

She and Whitfield Diffie have written "Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption," which won 1998 Donald McGannon Communication Policy Research Award, and the 1999 IEEE-USA Award for Distinguished Literary Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the Profession. Landau is also primary author of the 1994 Association for Computing Machinery report "Codes, Keys, and Conflicts: Issues in US Crypto Policy." Before becoming involved in policy, Landau had worked in symbolic computation and algebraic algorithms, discovering several polynomial-time algorithms for problems that previously only had exponential-time solutions. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Landau is a member of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Computer System Security and Privacy Advisory Board, as well as a member of the Association for Computing Machinery's Advisory Committee on Privacy and Security, and ACM's Committee on Law and Computing Technology. She has appeared on NPR several times, and has had articles published in the "Boston Globe," "Chicago Tribune," "Christian Science Monitor," "Scientific American," as well as numerous scientific journals.

Landau received her PhD from MIT (1983), her MS from Cornell (1979), and her BA from Princeton (1976).