Grantee Professor Gregor Leander

Gregor Leander studied mathematics at the University of Bremen and completed his PhD at Ruhr University Bochum in 2004. Funded by the German Academic Exchange Service, he transferred to the University of Toulon, France, as a postdoctoral researcher in 2006, from where he moved to the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby as an associate professor in 2008. In 2012, he returned to Ruhr University Bochum, where he was appointed to a Heisenberg Professorship in 2015. He’s a Principle Investigator at the Cluster of Excellence CASA, short for “Cyber Security in the Age of Large-Scale Adversaries”, and Dean of the Graduate School there. Two of the ciphers he designed (Present and Skinny) are ISO-certified. His research has already been presented with a Best Paper Award twice, and he also won first place at the German IT Security Award in 2010. He has held the Chair of Symmetric Cryptography at the Faculty of Computer Science since 2022.