Key competences: Decentralized systems - Systems engineering - Network security - Research excellence - Effective communication - Cross-functional collaboration - Academic lecturing and course design - Strategic planning and execution - Project management: PRINCE2 and Agile certified 

BIO

Vero Estrada-Galiñanes ​is a senior scientist at the Decentralized and Distributed Systems (DEDIS) laboratory of Prof. Bryan Ford, located at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. The DEDIS lab builds fast, scalable, and decentralized distributed protocols. The research spans across blockchain technologies, zero-trust applications, decentralized financial systems, secure, and privacy-preserving technologies. 

Previously, she was an Associate Professor (tenured) teaching distributed systems at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Vero's main research interests are dependable systems, file and storage systems, distributed systems, particularly decentralized systems and their applications to empower individuals, communities and societies. To attain her goals, she often conducts interdisciplinary research across various areas and brings the socio-technical and ethical perspective to the design and development of systems. 

In 2017, she received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Her main research outcome was the invention of alpha entanglement codes. Previously, she had received an Electronics Engineer diploma (2003) from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a degree (2005) in security and cryptography after 1-year postgraduate course at the Higher Education Army Institute (currently UNIDEF), Argentina. Between 2008 and 2011 she was an international scholar at Nakao's Lab doing deep packet analysis with captured network packets at the university main network gateway. Additionally, she obtained a Masters in Information Science (2011) from the University of Tokyo, Japan. During 2016, she was a visiting scholar at the Center for Research in Systems and Storage doing research in advanced algorithms to improve the usability, performance, scalability, security, and reliability of large scale distributed storage systems. The Center is established in the University of California, Santa Cruz, with strong ties to the storage system industry: Silicon Valley has long been a center of the storage industry in the United States. During 2018, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the area of health informatics at the University of Copenhagen. 

Additionally, she has substantial experience in the industry and public government in technical and leadership positions, which includes leading a critical national project  to monitor fishing activities in the Argentina Economic Exclusive Zone. She gained significant experience in the industry, military and government areas with participation in projects that span a wide variety of subjects, gaining experience in security, machine learning and artificial neural networks (SOM), storage systems, healthcare, geographical information systems, Internet traffic, oil and gas industry, and fisheries. Throughout her career she worked with large amounts of unstructured and structure data from diverse areas (network packets, vessel positioning, serial data from wearable devices, video analysis). To sum up, she developed a broad and diverse range of multidisciplinary skills. 

Vero started to work when she was 16 years old by setting her own successful business. She studied electronics engineer as a full time student while working 100% in the industry. In the same way, she continued to study security and cryptography while working. 

Vero is genuinely interested by science and technology, society, education, culture and art causes. She has collaborated with FOSS projects (Hyphanet ex-Freenet, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Ethereum Swarm) and participated twice in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program. She organized information events for students curious about GSoC at ETHZ and UNINE. She has volunteered as a news editor for the ACM Students magazine XRDS Crossroads for more than a year. She was a tutor at the Swiss Youth in Science (Schweizer Jugend forscht) program, and a keynote speaker at an event for hundreds of K-12 students organized by the Rotary club Saitama. She also was a volunteer promoting friendly cultural and commercial relationships at the annual golf championship organized by the Argentine Embassy in Tokyo. Finally, she was part of the committee of the UNINE Diversity Office and a member of the steering committee for the non-profit "Lecturers without Borders" (LEWIBO).  

In her free time, she enjoys cooking, gardening, reading, and learning new stuff.