Elli Androulaki

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Dr. Elli Androulaki is a Distinguished Research Staff Member and Research Manager at the IBM Research Lab in Zurich, Switzerland working in the area of Decentralised Trust, including emerging technologies around regulated Digital Assets, Central Bank Digital Currencies and Identity.

Elli completed her PhD in Columbia University in NY in the area of applied cryptography aiming to address privacy issues in eCommerce activities. During her Postdoctoral studies at ETH, Zurich, her research interests naturally led her to investigating Bitcoin security in 2011, where she co-invented and published the first security attack in Bitcoin.

Elli joined IBM Research in May 2013, and shortly after, she took on the responsibility for leading the IBM contributions to security and privacy components of Hyperledger Fabric, becoming one of the architects of Hyperledger Fabric. In the most recent years, Elli focused a modular token enablement for Hyperledger Fabric and respective privacy mechanisms in the permissioned ledger setting.

In March 2019, Elli was appointed as a manager of the Blockchain activities in IBM Research-Zurich, and in February 2020, Elli has taken on wider responsibilities in the area of Blockchain Research Strategy.

During her research years Elli authored a book on ``Bitcoin and Blockchain Security'', multiple impactful papers (> 8000 citations) and patents, and has served to the program committees of prestigious Blockchain conferences.