Research
My research aims to anticipate malicious and unintended technology risks.
For my PhD, I focused on why people fall for online scams. Through psychological experiments and user studies, I developed an adversarial training method and novel e-mail features that improved people's ability to detect phishing attacks.
Now,, as a Senior Research Fellow in the Dawes Centre for Future Crime at University College London (UCL), I examine how emerging technologies, such as social robots and brain-computer interfaces, could be exploited or misused in the near future. I am particularly fascinated with questions around how technology may drive us to redefine crime, and even more fundamentally, how they redefine humanity. By working with industry leaders and policymakers, my work aims to help shape a safer future.
Emerging technology risks
Sarah Y. Zheng, Shane D. Johnson, Paul Ekblom and Lorenzo Pasculli. 2026. Social Robots and Future Crime: A Scoping Literature Review. Crime Science.
Sarah Y. Zheng, Shane D. Johnson, Paul Ekblom, Mark Maslin, Lauren Young, Manja Nikolovska, Herve Borrion and Lorenzo Pasculli. 2026. Mapping Current and Potential Criminal and Security Issues Associated with Climate Change Mitigation Technologies. Sustainable Futures.
Sarah Y. Zheng and Lorenzo Pasculli. 2026. Anticipating Crime and Security Risks Enabled by Social Robots: A Research and Policy Agenda. SocArXiv
Sarah Y. Zheng Shane D. Johnson, and Lorenzo Pasculli. 2026. Expert-identified Crime and Security Risks Related to Climate Change Mitigation Technologies. SocArXiv
Popular writing
Tarnveer Singh and Sarah Y. Zheng. 2026. Security is Human – The CISO’s psychological edge. Chartered Institute for Information Security.
Tarnveer Singh and Sarah Y. Zheng. 2026. Psychology, AI and the Modern Security Program: A CISO’s Guide to Human Centric Defence. Infosecurity Magazine.
Tarnveer Singh and Sarah Y. Zheng. 2025. The Psychology of Cybersecurity: Hacking and the Human Mind. Taylor & Francis. ISBN: 9781041005711. New York, NY, Routledge.
Online scams & security
Sarah Y. Zheng and Ingolf Becker. 2026. What phishing click rates don’t show. In Festschrift for Prof Angela Sasse.
Sarah Zheng, Liron Rozenkrantz and Tali Sharot. 2024. Poor lie detection related to under-reliance on statistics and overreliance on own behaviour. Communications Psychology.
Sarah Zheng. 2024. Online scam detection using human psychology: Toward usable cybersecurity. Access via ProQuest.
Valentina Vellani, Sarah Zheng, Dilay Ercelik and Tali Sharot. 2023. The illusory truth effect leads to the spread of misinformation. Cognition.
Sarah Zheng and Ingolf Becker. 2023. Phishing to improve detection. In The European Symposium on Usable Security.
Sarah Zheng and Ingolf Becker. 2023. Checking, nudging or scoring? Evaluating e-mail user security tools. In Nineteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security.
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.
