Dr. Cao has served as a full-time Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology. She is an active researcher in various evolutionary fields within computer science, including data engineering and information systems. Her research interests encompass recommendation systems, evolutionary dynamic data partitioning optimization for data privacy protection and utility, deep learning for vulnerability exploitability, Reliable Queries in Uncertain Databases, Top-k Query Ranking, and Decision Supporting Systems.

She has successfully supervised 11 PhD graduates, 2 Master's students, and 57 Honour students, many of whom have secured positions at universities in Australia and overseas. Additionally, several of her Honours and Master's graduates have found employment in esteemed industries such as Oracle, Unisys, Computer Sciences Corporation, National Australia Bank, and Commonwealth Bank.

Dr. Cao has authored over 150 research papers in prestigious international conferences and journals, including VLDB, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Distributed and Parallel Processing, and Knowledge-Based Systems. Throughout her research career, she has remained committed to addressing important and challenging problems in evolutionary computing research fields.

Her research excellence is evidenced by her consistently high-quality publications, competitive research funding, and collaborations with internationally renowned scholars. She has been awarded three ARC grants and currently leads the ARC-funded discovery project titled "Knowledge Graph-driven Software Vulnerability Risk Discovery and Assessment," with funding of $450,000 for the period 2023-2025.

Dr. Cao is actively engaged in professional research communities, serving as an Associate Editor of Health Information Science and Systems and contributing as a reviewer and PC member for numerous international journals and conferences. She has also acted as a Guest Editor for a Special Issue on "Multimedia Data Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks" for the International Journal of Sensor Networks. Over the past 20 years, she has served as a thesis examiner for PhD and research Masters at various universities across Australia.

https://scholars.latrobe.edu.au/jcao