Members

Alex Davidson

Alex is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department of Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Previously, he was a cryptography researcher in the Research teams at Brave Software and Cloudflare, and a post-doctoral researcher at LIP Lisboa under the guidance of Joana Gonçalves de Sá. He completed his PhD on topics in secure computation at Royal Holloway University of London, under the supervision of Carlos Cid.

His research focuses on applications of cryptography in the Internet setting, and concrete constructions of cryptographic primitives from lattice-based assumptions. Most recently, he has worked on building practical privacy-preserving protocols for data aggregation and retrieval scenarios, from practical cryptographic building blocks. He is also the co-author of three Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Standards documents/drafts related to this research. You can find more information about him on his website.

Kevin Gallagher

Kevin Gallagher is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department of NOVA School of Science and Technology and an integrated member of NOVA LINCS. He received his PhD from New York University, and is a founder of PrivacyLX, a Tor Core Contributor, and an activist. Kevin’s main research interests lie in anonymity, privacy, and user experience.

Kevin is extremely interested in the intersection of technology and people, and believes that technology can be a force for social change. He hopes to help guide that change in a positive direction through his education work, research work, notforprofit work, and activism. You can find more information on his homepage.

João Ribeiro

João is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department of Universidade Nova de Lisboa and a researcher at NOVA LINCS. Previously, he was a post doctoral fellow in the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University hosted jointly by Vipul Goyal and Venkatesan Guruswami.

He received his PhD from the Department of Computing of Imperial College London, where he was advised by Mahdi Cheraghchi. During his PhD, João also spent some time at CQT (hosted by Divesh Aggarwal), UIUC (hosted by Olgica Milenkovic), and UMich (hosted by Mahdi Cheraghchi). Before that, he received an MSc in Computer Science from ETH Zurich and a BSc in Applied Mathematics and Computation from Instituto Superior Técnico.

João’s main research interests lie in the foundations of cryptography, coding and information theory, and pseudorandomness. You can find more information on his homepage.

Fernando Virdia

Fernando Virdia is a post-doctoral researcher in the Associação para a Inovação e Desenvolvimento da FCT NOVA.ID.FCT. Previously, he was a Research Scientist at Intel Labs and a post-doctoral researcher at the Applied Cryptography Group at ETH Zürich.

In 2021, he graduated with a PhD from the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London, under the supervision of Martin R. Albrecht.

Fernando’s current research focuses on developing new practical functionality for secure messaging. He also actively works in cryptanalysis, with a special focus towards post-quantum cryptographic hardness assumptions. More details on his background and work can be found on his personal website.