Pierangela Samarati is a Professor at the Department of Information Technology of the University of Milan. Her main research interests are in data security, information system security, access control policies, models and systems, and information protection in general. She has been Computer Scientist in the Computer Science Laboratory at SRI, CA (USA) and a visiting researcher at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University, CA (USA), and at the ISSE Department of George Mason University, VA (USA). She is co-author of the book "Database Security," Addison-Wesley, 1995. She is co-recipient of the ACM PODS Best Newcomer Award for the paper "Minimal Data Upgrading to Prevent Inference and Association Attacks". She is Chair of the IFIP WG11.3 Working Group on Data and Application Security.