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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Prof. Kevin Esvelt
Foundation Council
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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Dean Andrew Yao
Foundation Council
Dean of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University; winner of the Turing Award and Kyoto Prize
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Dr. Konrad Hurni
Foundation Council
Experienced financial and operations manager; PhD in Economics from the University of St. Galen
Management Team
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Jens Berlips
Management team
Swedish health tech entrepreneur with interest in biosafety; managing the SecureDNA project and the Swiss Foundation
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Dr. Leonard Foner
Management team
Software architect and security lead for SecureDNA, with research background in cryptography, distributed systems, and privacy-protecting technologies
Cryptography Team
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Prof. Carsten Baum
Cryptography Team
Associate Professor in Cybersecurity Section at DTU Compute; Assistant Professor at Computer Science Department at Aarhus University
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Prof. Ivan Damgård
Cryptography Team
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
Cryptography Team
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
Cryptography Team
Assistant professor of computer science at Tsingua University's Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences; leads the Innovative Data-centric Efficient Architecture Lab (IDEAL)
Academic Advisors
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Prof. Adi Shamir
Academic Advisor
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
Academic Advisor
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
Academic Advisor
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
Academic Advisor
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
Academic Advisor
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
Academic Advisor
Associate professor of computer science at Northeastern University, with research interests in all aspects of modern cryptography, including theoretical foundations and applications to informationsecurity
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Dr. Brian Wang
Academic Advisor
Head of R&D at Alvea , which aims to develop and rigorously test a scalable and shelf-stable COVID-19 vaccine; former postdoctoral researcher under Prof. Kevin Esvelt at the Sculpting Evolution Group at the MIT Media Lab
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Dr. Emma Chory
Academic Advisor
Post-doctoral fellow in MIT Media Lab's Sculpting Evolution group , currently researching the use of directed evolution of biosynthetic pathways to synthesize novel peptide therapeutics for several diseases
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Dr. Erika DeBenedictis
Academic Advisor
Principal Investigator at the Biodesign Library at the Francis Crack Institute ; physicist and synthetic biologist with PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT
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Xiang Li
Academic Advisor
PhD candidate at Tsinghua University's Institute of Network Science and Cyberspace, with research interests including network and protocol security
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Dana Gretton
Academic Advisor
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