Peter Schwabe is scientific director at MPI-SP and professor at Radboud University. He graduated from RWTH Aachen University in computer science in 2006 and received a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of Eindhoven University of Technology in 2011. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Information Science and the Research Center for Information Technology Innovation of Academia Sinica, Taiwan and at National Taiwan University. His research area is cryptographic engineering; in particular the security and performance of cryptographic software. He published more than 70 articles in journals and at international conferences presenting, for example, fast software for a variety of cryptographic primitives including AES, hash functions, elliptic-curve cryptography, and cryptographic pairings. He has also published articles on fast cryptanalysis, in particular attacks on the discrete-logarithm problem. In recent years he has focused in particular on post-quantum cryptography. He co-authored the "NewHope" and "NTRU-HRSS" lattice-based key-encapsulation schemes which were used in post-quantum TLS experiments by Google and he is co-submitter of seven proposals to the NIST post-quantum crypto project, all of which made it to the second round, five of which made it to the third round, and 3 of which were selected after round 3 for standardization. In 2021, he co-founded the Formosa-Crypto project, an effort by multiple research groups to build (post-quantum) cryptographic software with formal proofs of functional correctness and security.
The scientific work carried out by Prof. Allen Caldwell currently includes the development of novel particle accelerator technology based on plasma wakefields, the study of the quarks and gluons and their interactions, the fundamental properties of neutrinos and, more recently, the search for a new candidate for Dark Matter - axions. In addition, he has a great interest in probability and statistics, and lectures on data analysis techniques and Monte Carlo methods at the Technical University of Munich.
The plasma based accelerator experiment is explained in the video How can plasma and proton beams be used in building next generation particle accelerators?
Prof. Caldwell was born in Verdun/France in 1959 and has the double citizenship of the USA and France. He studied physics at Rice University in Texas, then moved to the University of Wisconsin where he earned his doctorate. He then spent 15 years at Columbia University, where he eventually became professor. In 1997, he became head of the ZEUS experiment at the HERA accelerator at DESY in Hamburg. In 1999, he was made director of the Nevis Laboratory at Columbia University in New York; since 2002 he has been a Member of the Board of Directors of the Max Planck Institute for Physics. He currently heads the AWAKE experiment at CERN .
