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Nikos Sapountzis

Redshift Security, SDE II, @Amazon, Bay Area

About me.

My full name is Nikolaos Sapountzis. I was born in June 1989, in one of the most outstanding islands worldwide, Crete, in southern Greece. Since I was very young, I figured out that the (table) games that mostly attracted my interest were the brain-teasing ones like Stratego, Risk and 21. This was a primary sign that helped me discover my passion on Logic and Maths, later at school. 

Following my love towards science, later on I joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering department of the Technical University of Crete (TUC). There, I got some basic knowledge on various electrical engineering and computer science topics e.g. programming, networking, artificial intelligence and electronics. However, what mostly influenced my career, ending up being an acute passion that I've always been trying to master, was the deep understanding of the "art of mathematics", and more importantly how one can exploit it to tackle challenging science problems. 

My PhD.

Minding all that, I decided to do a PhD that would not only strengthen my mathematical and theoretical skills but also reinforce me with a good feeling of how one can apply theory (mathematics) into practice (science problems). So, in 2013 I joined Eurecom (affiliated with Telecom ParisTech) in Southern France. There, I analytically studied various challenging and potentially coupling networking problems that emerge in the 5G/IoT era, and optimally tackled them using advanced applied mathematics tools. My research work, significantly contributing to the next generation mobile networks, is already published in the flagship conferences and journals of the field (e.g. IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking). 

Work Experience.

I worked for 2 years at the University of Florida as a postdoc associate on different cybersecurity projects and published several publications on leading conferences and journals. My work includes email phishing, software security and advance persistent threat detection. I led FAROS team across different US universities, as part of Transparent Computing (TC) project, funded by DARPA, US army.

Then, I worked at Cisco as a Sr Software Engineer building tools for Network Functional Virtualization tools for modern Cloud Networks. I am involved in writing patents with shared IPs between Cisco and University of Florida with primary focused on Cybersecurity topics.

Now, I am working at Amazon in different cybersecurity projects for AWS Redshift.

Awards.