Work Experience and Background

Industry Work Experience: 

Currently,  I am research coordinator at Web3 Foundation. 

From June 2023 until March 2024, I was lead researcher at Parity Technologies working with Parity's core devs and researchers from Web3 Foundation on Polkadot and Kusama. From October 2021 to November 2022 I worked at Heliax AG as a research lead (last seven  months as research director), where I  was helping with the Namada and the Anoma blockchain projects. 

From November 2018 until September 2021 I worked at Web3 Foundation where we have been focusing on decentralized technologies in particular the Polkadot and Kusama networks.

 At W3F, I have had several roles: acting CTO (as main role 1 year), research team lead (as main role 1 year), research scientist (as main role 11 months).  As acting CTO role, I led the research, ecosystem growth, technical education, and secops teams. In my research team lead role, I led about 10 researchers from diverse backgrounds, and in my research scientist role, I conducted research focusing on networking and interoperability. 

Education and Academic Work Experience: 

I obtained my Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering from KU Leuven in the renowned Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC) group, under the supervision of Prof. Claudia Diaz and co-supervision of Dr. Markulf Kohlweiss (University of Edinburgh). During my Ph.D. studies, I was also affiliated with imec. My Ph.D. thesis was titled "Investigating and Improving Anonymous Communication Systems."

I was a researcher in the CDC group led by Prof. Johannes Buchmann at TU Darmstadt, where my research focus was on measuring the resilience of anonymous communication networks against denial-of-service attacks and investigating privacy in online social networks. At TU Darmstadt, I was also a teaching assistant for three lectures and five seminars, and a researcher in the acatech Internet Privacy project. 

I obtained my M.Sc. in Computer Science from Saarland University, where I worked for two years as a part-time student assistant at German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in the Secure Systems group, led by Dr. Werner Stephan, helping with verifying secure partitioning for the PikeOS operating system. 

Awards and Media:

• Our papers, "Collateral Damage by Facebook Applications: a Comprehensive Study" and "Collateral Damage of Facebook Apps: Friends, Providers, and Privacy Interdependence", were featured in an article of France24 (last modification: 21/03/2018).

• Our paper, "Collateral Damage by Facebook Applications: a Comprehensive Study", was featured in an article in NBC News (published: 21/03/2018, title: "Researchers say it was easy to take people's data from Facebook", author: Brandy Zadrozny). AOL re-posted the article here. 

• I was a Microsoft Research Ph.D. scholarship holder from 05/2015 to 04/2018.

• I received a travel grant to attend CrossFyre 2016 and a stipend for conference attendance from PETS 2016.

• I received the Best Teaching Assistance award from the Computer Science department at TU Darmstadt, awarded for assisting the lecture "Introduction to Cryptography" WS 2012/2013 (awarded in 2015).

My Erdös number is 3 through my work with Johannes Buchmann who worked with Kálmán Győry.  :-)