Yan Zhu is a security engineer, open web standards author, technology speaker, and open source contributor.Yan Zhu is a high school dropout who earned a B.S.
in physics at MIT.
She enrolled as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at Stanford University in experimental cosmology but dropped out after four months.
She worked for Yahoo as a security engineer from 2014 to 2015, was a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and is currently the chief security officer at Brave Software.In 2015 she was recognized as one of Forbes 30 Under 30, and elected to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG).In July 2018, Zhu interviewed whistleblower Chelsea Manning at the biennial HOPE conference in New York City.