Yan Chen

Yan Chen is a Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University's Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. He leads the Northwestern Lab for Internet and Security Technology (LIST) and the Center for Ultra-scale Computing and Information Security. His research focuses on cybersecurity, network measurement, and distributed systems security. Chen holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley (2003), M.S. from SUNY Stony Brook, and B.E. from Zhejiang University.

Research interests include securing networking systems, intrusion detection, cloud-native platforms, and mobile security. Notable awards include the DOE Early CAREER Award (2005), Air Force Young Investigator Award (2007), and ACM ASPLOS'18 Most Influential Paper Award. His work has been cited over 17,000 times with an h-index of 62 (2024).

Key contributions include the LIST lab's advancements in APT detection, provenance tracking in microservices, and security frameworks like FlowCog. He advises numerous Ph.D. students and has graduated over 20 researchers now in academia and industry.