Our team

SecureDNA is composed of academic life scientists and cryptographers, policy analysts, information security specialists, and software engineers from many nations.

Foundation Council

Management Team

  • Jens Berlips

    Swedish health tech entrepreneur with interest in biosafety; managing the SecureDNA project and the Swiss Foundation

  • Dr. Leonard Foner

    Software architect and security lead for SecureDNA, with research background in cryptography, distributed systems, and privacy-protecting technologies

Cryptography Advisors

  • Photo of Ivan Damgard

    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

  • Yu Yu

    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

  • Mingyu Gao

    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)

  • Prof Carsten Baum

    Prof. Carsten Baum

    Associate Professor in Cybersecurity Section at DTU Compute

Academic Advisors

  • Adi Shamir

    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

  • Lan Xue

    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

  • Ron Rivest

    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

  • Vinod Vaikuntanathan

    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

  • Kenneth Oye

    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

  • Daniel Wichs

    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

  • Kevin Esvelt

    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

  • Emma Chory

    Dr. Emma Chory

    Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University.

  • Erika DeBeneditis

    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

  • Xiang Li

    PhD candidate at Tsinghua University's Institute of Network Science and Cyberspace, with research interests including network and protocol security

  • Brian Wang

    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

  • Dana Gretton

    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.

A worldwide research collaboration

  • 资源 2
  • Shanghai Jiao Tong University
  • Weizmann Institute of Science logo
  • Aarhus University logo
  • DTU (university) logo