Sergey Gorbunov

Sergey is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo (2016 – present). He is interested in building cryptographic primitives, protocols, and systems that enable new applications in untrusted and distributed environments. 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 the Sprowls Doctoral Thesis Award for best thesis in CS at MIT. He was on the founding team of Algorand where he was involved in various business and technical aspects of the company and led the cryptography group. He also spent some time at IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre.

Sergey Gorbunov works on building systems and protocols that protect data and information in untrusted, distributed, and highly adversarial environments (such as in cloud-computing or blockchains). He wants 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, he designs new cryptographic models, primitives, and systems.

• Axelar Network Builder & Co-Founder
• University of Waterloo Assistant Professor