The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has awarded Veni grants to Léo Ducas and Johannes Köster of CWI. The funding allows these researchers, who have recently obtained their PhD, to conduct independent research and develop their ideas for a period of three years. The Veni is one of three types of grants under the prestigious Innovational Research Incentives Scheme of NWO.
Léo Ducas (Cryptology group) received a Veni grant for his project ‘Cryptanalysis of Lattice-based Cryptography’. In this project, he will work on developing cryptography resilient to attacks by quantum computers. The quantum computer, which is estimated to be available within 10-15 years, will be able to break many of the current-day cryptography. A promising new technique over which quantum computes have no advantage uses high-dimensional mathematical lattices. Ducas will work on understanding of these techniques in order to allow the development of new international standards. Ducas obtained his PhD at École normale supérieure (ENS) and Université Paris VII in 2013, and is a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Ronald Cramer at CWI since 2015.
Johannes Köster (Life Sciences group) was awarded a Veni grant for his project ‘Fully reproducible workflows scaling from workstations to the cloud’. He will develop a framework for reproducible data analysis that can handle big data in the cloud. Today, data analytics faces two major challenges: the reproducibility of scientific results obtained from data, and efficient computation in the cloud. Köster will integrate algorithmic solutions that address both issues into the workflow management system Snakemake. Köster obtained his PhD at the University of Dortmund in 2015 and is a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Alexander Schönhuth at CWI since 2016.
The Veni grant is one of the personal grants of NWO established to stimulate talented, creative researchers. It amounts to a maximum of 250.000 euro, allowing the recipient to do research for three years. Obtaining this grant is an important step in a scientific career. NWO selected 158 projects from a total of 1056 submissions.
More information:
NWO website
Image: NWO
