Our team
SecureDNA is composed of academic life scientists and cryptographers, policy analysts, information security specialists, and software engineers from many nations.
Foundation Council
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Dean Andrew Yao
Dean of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University; winner of the Turing Award and Kyoto Prize
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Raphael Egger
Attorney-at-Law and Partner at Egger Dommer Bär; specializing in corporate law and corporate transactions (M&A)
Management Team
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Jens Berlips
Swedish health tech entrepreneur with interest in biosafety; managing the SecureDNA project and the Swiss Foundation
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Dr. Leonard Foner
Software architect and security lead for SecureDNA, with research background in cryptography, distributed systems, and privacy-protecting technologies
Cryptography Advisors
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Prof. Ivan Damgård
Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University; co-inventor of the Merkle-Damgård construction, used in important cryptographic functions including SHA-2 and MD5
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Prof. Yu Yu
Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Department of Computer Science and Engineering, with special interests in pseudorandomness and leakage-resilient cryptography
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Prof. Mingyu Gao
Assistant professor of computer science at Tsingua University's Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences; leads the Innovative Data-centric Efficient Architecture Lab (IDEAL)
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Prof. Carsten Baum
Associate Professor in Cybersecurity Section at DTU Compute
Academic Advisors
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Prof. Adi Shamir
Professor at Weizmann Institute; co-inventor of widely used RSA algorithm and Feige-Fiat-Shamir identification scheme; one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis
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Dean Lan Xue
Distinguished Professor and Dean of Schwarzman College in Tsinghua University, with research interests in public policy analysis, science and technology policy, and global governance
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Prof. Ron Rivest
One of just twelve Institute Professors across MIT; co-inventor of the widely used RSA public-key cryptosystem; inventor of symmetric key encryption algorithms RC2, RC4, and RC5
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Prof. Vinod Vaikuntanathan
Professor of computer science at MIT; chief cryptographer at Duality Technologies; Gödel Prize winner (2022); co-inventor of modern fully homomorphic encryption systems and several lattice-based primitives
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Prof. Kenneth Oye
Professor of Political Science, Professor of Data Systems and Society; Director of the MIT Program on Emerging Technologies, with research interests in international relations, political economy, and tech policy
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Prof. Daniel Wichs
Associate professor of computer science at Northeastern University, with research interests in all aspects of modern cryptography, including theoretical foundations and applications to information security
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Prof. Kevin Esvelt
Director of the Sculpting Evolution Group at the MIT Media Lab; co-founder of the SecureDNA Foundation; inventor of CRISPR-based gene drive
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Dr. Emma Chory
Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University.
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Dr. Erika DeBenedictis
Principal Investigator at the Biodesign Library at the Francis Crick Institute; physicist and synthetic biologist with PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT
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Xiang Li
PhD candidate at Tsinghua University's Institute of Network Science and Cyberspace, with research interests including network and protocol security
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Dr. Brian Wang
Executive Director of Panoplia Laboratories, which is developing next-generation broad-spectrum antivirals. Former postdoctoral researcher under Prof. Kevin Esvelt at the Sculpting Evolution Group at the MIT Media Lab
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Dana Gretton
PhD candidate at MIT Media Lab specializing in DNA security and liquid handling robotics, graduate research assistant at Sculpting Evolution Group
Additional contributions
We are also grateful for research contributions from Hongri Cui, Jiangbin Dong, Kaiyi Li, Rey Edison, and Andres Fabrega.