Sergey Gorbunov

Sergey Gorbunov is Co-Founder of Axelar, an Assistant Professor at University of Waterloo (CrySP group). I work on building systems and protocols that protect data and information in untrusted, distributed, and highly adversarial environments (such as in cloud-computing or blockchains). I want to enable new types of applications that have built-in trust and security properties and allow users to share, exchange, and compute information without having to trust each other or any third party. Towards this, I design new cryptographic models, primitives, and systems. He received a Ph.D. from MIT, where he was a Microsoft Ph.D. fellow, and MSc and BSc from UToronto. His Ph.D. dissertation was on designing cryptographic tools for the cloud using lattice-based cryptography for which he received Sprowls Doctoral Thesis Prize for best thesis in CS at MIT. He was the founder and CTO at Stealthmine, the founding team member at Algorand where he was involved in various business and technical aspects of the business and led the cryptography group. He also spent some time at IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre.