1 August 2020. Prof. Dr. Aikaterini Mitrokotsa, born on the 8th of October 1978, is a Greek citizen.

Before joining the University of St.Gallen, she was a professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, that she joined in 2013. She has served as visiting professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan), ETHZ (Switzerland) and Vrije Universiteit (Netherlands) as well as a visiting scholar at Harvard University (USA). Formerly, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft in the Netherlands (2008-2010) and a senior researcher (Marie-Curie Fellow) at EPFL (2010-2012). She has received her "docent" title (corresponding to habilitation) in computer science from Chalmers University of Technology in 2014 and her PhD on "Intrusion Detection in Computer Networks Using Machine Learning Algorithms" from the University of Piraeus in 2007. She has served as a member of the permanent stakeholders advisory committee for ENISA (European Union Agency for Cybersecurity) (2012-2019) and is since 2019 a member of the research evaluation panel in computer science for FWO (Research Foundation - Flanders).

Security and privacy in communication technologies

Prof. Dr. Aikaterini Mitrokotsa has a clear research strategy. The main aim of her research is to safeguard communication technologies and resolve security and privacy issues in mobile and wireless networks; with a special focus on resource-constrained environments (e.g., Internet of Things (IoT devices)). She is experienced in all aspects of protocol design and security analysis with an emphasis on the design of authentication protocols and especially proximity-based authentication, privacy-preservation, biometric authentication, and the design of intrusion detection and response mechanisms. Furthermore, she has significant expertise in the design of protocols used to outsource computations to untrusted servers (verifiable delegation of computation) used in the context of cloud-assisted computing as well as on defining post-quantum cryptographic primitives. She is also known in her research community for her work in security and privacy issues in ubiquitous computing (e.g., RFID and sensor networks) and the optimal design of provably secure and privacy-preserving communication protocols. She has published her research results in top-tiered international journals and conferences (e.g., Journal of Computer Security, Computers & Security (Elsevier), IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, INFOCOM, ASIACRYPT). Her current and future research interests include security and privacy in cloud-assisted computing, quantum resistant cryptographic primitives, secure and private machine learning, authentication and privacy-preservation as well as intrusion detection and anonymous routing.

Awarded Research Projects

Prof. Dr. Mitrokotsa has extensive experience in national and international projects. More precisely, she has been awarded the prestigious young investigator grant by the Swedish Research Council  for the project "PRECIS: Privacy and Security in Wearable Computing Devices" as well as a Marie Curie IE fellowship for the project "PPIDR: Privacy-Preserving Intrusion Detection & Response" and a MoRE fellowship funded by Marie Curie COFUND. She has been awarded the NWO Rubicon research award and has received multiple STINT research grants in collaboration with Harvard University, Tokyo Institute of Technology and City University of Hong Kong, focusing on security and privacy in ubiquitous computing.  Furthermore, she has been co-investigator in the FP7 Projekt "BEAT: Biometric Evaluation & Testing", the SNF-Projekt Sinergia "SwissSenseSynergy" and currently in the H2020 Marie Curie ITN project "TRESSPASS-ETN: Training in Secure & Privacy-Preserving Biometrics".

This is the first appointment of a full professorship for Cyber Security. The emphasis and focus of the appointment of Prof. Dr. Aikaterini Mitrokotsa lies in the development of the School of Computer Science, basic teaching and research.