Vrizlynn Thing

Dr Vrizlynn Thing is the Senior Vice President, Head of Cybersecurity Strategic Technology Centre at ST Engineering. She provides thought leadership and guide her technology and business teams to lead and drive security technology innovation so as to enable the creation of differentiating products, solutions and services, and advise on strategic projects. Dr Thing also holds the appointment of Honorary Assistant Superintendent of Police (Specialist V) at the Singapore Police Force, Ministry of Home Affairs, where she contributes to the fight against crimes through insightful analysis and knowledge sharing on related advanced techniques and technologies.

Prior to joining ST Engineering, Dr Thing was the Head of Cybersecurity R&D at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), and led in establishing partnerships with the industry and government agencies. Concurrently, she was holding Co-Director appointments of Cybersecurity Joint Labs that she established between A*STAR and its industry partners like KPMG, Sopra Steria, Custodio and ST Engineering, where she set the directions for the joint cybersecurity programmes and led the R&D teams. At the same time, she was holding Adjunct Associate Professor appointments at the National University of Singapore, and the Singapore Management University, where she conducted lectures on courses ranging from foundation to post-graduate level on Cybersecurity and Digital Forensics, and guided students on advanced technology R&D projects.

Dr Thing has over two decades of cybersecurity research, development and large-scale cyber programme management & implementation experience, working closely with the industry and government agencies. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, and filed 13 patents with 4 granted to-date. She is also actively involved in national level initiatives such as the Coordinating Committee for Cybersecurity where she co-leads discussions on Smart Nation/ITMs/Emerging Technologies, and the Autonomous Vehicle Technical Committee where she co-leads discussions on cybersecurity assurance, with Singapore's Government Technology Agency, Cyber Security Agency, and Land Transport Authority. She also sits on the International Advisory Board, YAKSHA, by European Commission, to reinforce EU and ASEAN partnership in Cybersecurity,

Dr Thing is the recipient of the Enterprise Singapore and Singapore Standards Council Commendation Award 2021, and is also honoured as the Singapore 100 Women in Tech 2021. She was also a 3-time winner of the Tan Kah Kee Young Inventors' Award, a 4-time recipient of Best Paper Awards at International Conferences, a 4-time recipient of the A STAR Institute for Infocomm Research's Role Model Award and its Achiever of the Year Award winner in 2012. She is also an active participant (with strong ranking and winning track records, individually or together with her teams) at Cybersecurity, Crime Analytics & Forensics related competitions on international platforms such as Kaggle, and overseas agencies/universities hosted competitions.

Dr Thing received her Ph.D. degree in Computing from Imperial College London, U.K., while holding the U.K. Overseas Research Students Award and the Imperial College London, Department of Computing Scholarship concurrently. During her Ph.D. studies, she won the "Best Student Paper Award" at the 20th IFIP International Information Security Conference, and the Imperial College London "Hilfred Chau Postgraduate Award", presented to "students with exceptional achievements in scholarship", for her work on cyber attack mutation, detection and mitigation. She was also a key research member in the European Union project "DIADEM Distributed Firewall", and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory & U.K. Ministry of Defence project "International Technology Alliance in Network and Information Science".

She obtained her Bachelor's (Hons) and Master's degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and her executive leadership training from National University of Singapore Business School.