Research
My academic work is centered around understanding and preventing emerging crime threats. During my PhD, I investigated why people are bad at detecting online scams. These experiments led to the development of adversarial training and novel e-mail features to improve people's ability to detect phishing e-mails.
Now, as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Dawes Centre for Future Crime at University College London (UCL), I research crime threats that may be enabled or facilitated by climate change and robotic technologies. Part of this work involves working with senior experts from government and industry to help shape policies to prevent the identified threats.
Journal articles
Sarah Zheng, Liron Rozenkrantz and Tali Sharot. 2024. Poor lie detection related to under-reliance on statistics and overreliance on own behaviour. Communications Psychology.
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Valentina Vellani, Sarah Zheng, Dilay Ercelik and Tali Sharot. 2023. The illusory truth effect leads to the spread of misinformation. Cognition.​
Doctoral thesis
Sarah Zheng. 2024. Online scam detection using human psychology: Toward usable cybersecurity. Access via ProQuest.
Conference papers
Sarah Zheng and Ingolf Becker. 2023. Phishing to improve detection. In The European Symposium on Usable Security.
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Sarah Zheng and Ingolf Becker. 2023. Checking, nudging or scoring? Evaluating e-mail user security tools. In Nineteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security.
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Sarah Zheng and Ingolf Becker. 2022. Presenting suspicious details in User-Facing e-mail headers does not improve phishing detection. In Eighteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security.
