He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Klagenfurt in 2011. Before joining UniBw M in 2023, he was a Senior Scientist in the cryptography research group at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) (2017–2023), a lecturer at the Vienna University of Technology (2018–2020), and a PostDoc and later Senior Researcher at the Institute of Information Security (formerly IAIK) at Graz University of Technology (2012–2017). His research interests span the foundations and applications of cryptography, with a particular focus on provably secure public-key cryptographic primitives and privacy-preserving cryptographic mechanisms. He is is one of the designers of the Picnic family of post-quantum digital signature schemes and a member of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).