CLOUDFLARE - Key Persons
Armando Faz is a research engineer working on securing cryptographic software and communication protocols. His research focuses on optimizing and developing communication protocols using classic and quantum-resistant cryptography.
Avani manages North American research projects at Cloudflare Research, and also maintains an affiliation as visiting assistant professor of computer science and neuroscience at Emory University. Her past positions include being a faculty member in computer science, a postdoc in neural computing, and a professional video game player. She holds a B.S. from Harvey Mudd College, M.S. from the University of New Mexico, and Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Avani's research interests lie in understanding the relationships between information and knowledge, encompassing measurement and data collection, data mining, and high performance information storage over time along with associated projects in environmental prediction and neural computability. At Cloudflare, she leads efforts to better understand and improve data movement at scale, future proof the internet, and collaborate with the greater academic community.
She also is the creator of Project Hypatia, a forum to collect and disseminate research driven by female or non-binary presenting scientists, as well as a fellow of and frequent speaker at Odd Salon San Francisco, a speaker series with the tag line "expert talks on odd topics; odd talks on everything else".
Bas is a mathematician with an interest in cryptography and quantum computing. He is a member of the SPHINCS⁺ team.
Bob is a research engineer working on distributed systems and networking protocols.
Prior to joining Cloudflare, Bob was the co-architect of BIND 8, the architect of BIND 9, and a co-founder of Nominum.
Chris is a research engineer working on cryptography and protocol design. He earned his PhD at the University of Florida under the guidance of Tom Shrimpton. There he focused on the gap between provable and real-world security of cryptographic schemes.
James is a research engineer focused on Internet infrastructure (e.g., the Web PKI and DNS), systems, and formal methods.
He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard University.
Job Titles:
- Researcher
- Research Engineer
Jonathan Hoyland is a cryptography researcher, with a focus on provable and verifiable security. He specialises in formal analysis, especially symbolic analysis, and protocol design. He is an active contributor to the IETF TLS Working Group. He has a Ph.D. in Information Security from Royal Holloway, University of London.
Luke Valenta is a research engineer primarily focused on building secure, reliable systems and measuring the Internet.
He is broadly interested in computer security, network and protocol measurement, applied cryptography, privacy, elliptic curves, cryptocurrencies, and distributed systems.
Prior to joining Cloudflare, he completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in applied cryptography and measurement of cryptographic devices.
Marwan is a technical lead and manager at Cloudflare Research, and Visiting Professor at the University of St Andrews, UK.
Before joining Cloudflare, Marwan was a member of faculty at the University of St Andrews, where he was also the Director of Post-graduate Studies, and recipient of multiple teaching and supervisorial honours. In 2011, Marwan co-founded HUBS c.i.c., a community cooperative backhaul ISP honoured at national and European levels for technical innovation and advocacy, and that continues to operate today. He previously held the appointment of ‘Theme Leader' (2014-2016) for networking research at SICSA, a computer science alliance among Scottish universities. His current research interests lie in secure, private, and reliable network protocols, and measurement in next generation edge networks.
He is an author on numerous peer-review publications, the recipient of an IEEE best paper award, and a Senior Member of both the IEEE and the ACM.
Peter Wu is a Research Engineer working on various TLS and cryptography-related projects. He is a contributor to many open source projects, including Wireshark, where he started in 2013 with TLS decryption improvements in order to assist in analyzing encrypted application traffic. Peter added TLS 1.3, QUIC, and WireGuard decryption support to Wireshark and aims to help people understand what is going on under the hood.
Suleman is a Research Engineer working at the intersection of product engineering and security research. His work and academic experience has span the following areas of interest: Security and Privacy, Internet Measurement, and Applied Machine Learning - particularly applications in Cybersecurity, and Distributed Systems.
He was previously enrolled in a fully-funded Masters program in Computer Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He served as a Graduate Assistant, working both as a Teaching and a Research Assistant, for the Computer Science department. His thesis focus was on detecting and analyzing real-world authentication attacks, and engineering measurement systems.
Tara Whalen is Privacy Research Engineering Lead at Cloudflare. She previously worked as a Privacy Engineer at Google and Apple, and as an IT Research Analyst at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Tara obtained a Master of Laws (with a Concentration in Law and Technology) and conducted post-doctoral research in computer security after receiving a PhD in computer science. Tara's professional experience in the information security and privacy fields includes roles in research labs, academia, federal government institutions, and the private sector.
Her research interests include usable security and privacy, as well as technology policy. She also contributes to Internet standards, as a member of ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) and having chaired the W3C's Privacy Interest Group (PING).
Thibault is a research engineer working on distributed systems. He is focused on making emerging technologies interoperable with current web standards. At Cloudflare, he works on IPFS, Ethereum, and alternatives to CAPTCHA systems.
Job Titles:
- Program Manager
- Research Program Manager
V nia is the Program Manager for Cloudflare Research. She leads the processes of tracking and delivering research work to both internal teams and external collaborations. She oversees engagement and outreach activities with academia and industry collaborations.
Before joining Cloudflare, V nia spent several years doing research on Future Internet technologies and business models at the University of Brussels (VUB) and INESC TEC. She has also worked in various roles in R&D management, technology innovation and project management in academia and in industry.
Vasileios (Vasilis) Giotsas is a research engineer focusing on network measurements and telemetry, the risk assessment and mitigation of topological and macroscopic vulnerabilities of critical Internet infrastructures, and the analysis of Internet routing policies and performance.
He has a position of a lecturer (assistant professor) at the Computer and Communications department of Lancaster University, and has worked as a research scientist at the Internet Measurement and Analysis group of Technischen Universität Berlin, and as postdoctoral researcher at CAIDA (Center of Advanced Internet Data Analysis) at the University of California San Diego. He has contributed in multiple mission-critical research projects funded by the UK National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR).
His work has been distinguished with the CoNEXT 2015 best paper award, and the IETF Applied Networking Research Prize 2016.
His datasets have been shortlisted in 2013 and 2014 for the ACM SIGCOMM Community Contribution Award. He was the recipient of two RIPE NCC Community Projects funds and two RIPE NCC fellowships.
Job Titles:
- Product Manager
- Product Manager for the Research Team
Wesley is the Product Manager for the Research Team at Cloudflare. Wesley leads the process of integrating product, engineering, and design with research to drive research innovations into our products. His primary focus areas include the distributed web, security and privacy, and emerging network paradigms. Before Cloudflare, he led product at Atrium and Snap Inc.
When he is not working on the future of the Internet, Wesley is deeply passionate about building community and building large-scale art in hostile environments.