Benessa Defend is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a recipient of the Ford Foundation Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship and of the 2006 NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes Fellowship for research at Kyushu University in Japan. Her research interests include RFID security, cryptography, and various privacy and anonymity topics. She is a member of the PRISMS lab under advisor Kevin Fu. In 2002, she earned her B.S. in Computer Science from Austin Peay State University.