Frances Foong Chu Yao (Chinese: 儲楓; pinyin: Chǔ Fēng) is a Taiwanese-American mathematician and theoretical computer scientist.
She is currently a Chair Professor at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) of Tsinghua University.
in mathematics from National Taiwan University in 1969, Yao did her Ph.D. studies under the supervision of Michael J. Fischer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving her Ph.D. in 1973.
In 2003, she came out of retirement to become the Head and a Chair Professor of the Department of Computer Science at City University of Hong Kong, which she held until June 2011.
Along with her husband Andrew Yao and Wang Xiaoyun, they found new attacks on the SHA-1 cryptographic hash function.