Dr Tan Mei Hui
Cyber Security Specialist, Cyber Security Group
Government Technology Agency (GovTech)
Cybersecurity expert Tan Mei Hui travelled to various secondary all-girls schools over the past year talking to students about cybersecurity as a career option.
Next January, she will be taking it a step further with one-on-one mentorship with selected students, in the hope of inspiring the next generation of female cybersecurity specialists.
To inject more diversity into what has been a male-dominated industry, Dr Tan is eager to show how women can be equally equipped to become engineers and take on related jobs in consulting and business development.
“I have been lucky to have great mentors, so I see this mentorship as a form of paying it forward,” says Dr Tan, who is from GovTech’s Cyber Security Group that protects the nation’s IT infrastructure and data. “I would tell the students to keep an open mind and never stop learning.”
These mentorship efforts are part of her involvement with the Association of Information Security Professionals’ (AiSP) Ladies in Cybersecurity Initiative. A prominent advocate for technology and innovation, Dr Tan was also invited to speak at key international forums such as Google I/O conference, Women Techmakers and Microsoft Tech Summit.
She also holds an executive committee role on the Singapore Computer Society’s Infocomm Security Chapter. There, she mentors tertiary students and young professionals pursuing cybersecurity as a profession on topics such as ethical hacking and security operations.
No stranger to a career switch, Dr Tan’s background is in electrical and computer engineering. She then pursued her PhD in machine learning and computer vision, before she was hired a senior consultant at Deloitte Singapore and a cyber risk assurance manager at PwC Singapore.
This on-the-job training and constant learning paved the way for her move from a research-driven work to her current role at GovTech, where she helps in the design, implementation, operationalisation and thought leadership of cybersecurity operations.
"My role requires familiarity with coding, security design and architecture,” she points out. “Our team also has diverse backgrounds, with specialties ranging from economics and mathematics to the sciences."
While her specialisation in machine learning, electrical and computer engineering are not directly part of cybersecurity, she says these are critical skills in the highly interdisciplinary cybersecurity field.
Major challenges in cybersecurity include ever-evolving threats and having to stay ahead of the latest trends and technologies, says Dr Tan. And she is game for it all, keen to solve problems for the good of society.
“Cybersecurity is a core component of national defence,” she points out. “My aim in life is to be able to make a positive difference in technology and the cyberspace safer for everyone.”