Dr. Svetla Nikova (Chair)

Research Expert, COSIC research group, Department of Electrical Engineering, KU Leuven


Board responsibilities: Marketing and communication, knowledge institutions activities and issues.

Dr. Svetla Nikova is currently a Research Expert in the research group COSIC at the Electrical Eng. Dept. of KU Leuven, Belgium. Prior to that she was assistant professor in University of Twente, NL (2008-2012). Svetla’s Ph.D. degree is from Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands and her M. Sc. degree is from Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria. Her research interests are in Cryptography. She is a co-author of more than 70 research papers in international journals and conferences. Among others she has co-invented together with Vincent Rijmen the side-channel resistance method called Threshold Implementations. She has been involved in a number of research projects (EU, Flemish, NL and US).

Svetla Nikova is member of the Management Committee of the ICT COST Action IC1306 Cryptography for Secure Digital Interaction. She is a member of the steering committee of CARDIS, has been a PC chair of EuroPKI 2011 and WAIFI 2016 as well as serving in a number of PCs (e.g., Eurocrypt 2016, Asiacrypt 2016, FSE CARDIS, etc.). She was a member of the Board of Directors of IACR (2014-2015) and was a general chair of Eurocrypt 2015.