Dr Marc Manzano is Executive Director of the Cryptography Research Center at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a UAE-based scientific research center. In this role, he supervises and coordinates the Center’s research and development teams.

His current research interests include post-quantum cryptography, lightweight cryptography, the intersection between machine learning and cryptanalysis, performance optimisations of cryptographic implementations on a wide range of architectures, and quantum algorithms. He has presented more than 25 articles at international conferences, published more than ten journal papers, and collaborated on several scientific books related to cryptography and computer networks security.

Over the past ten years, Dr Manzano has led the development of many secure cryptographic libraries and protocols. He was formerly Executive Director of the Cryptography Research and Development division at DarkMatter, now part of Digital14, a cyber-security leader based in the UAE. Prior to that, he held a position at Scytl were he was responsible for implementing pivotal cryptographic components of an electronic voting platform. Dr Manzano also has worked at Marfeel, where he contributed to the creation of a data collection and prediction engine using machine learning techniques.

Dr Manzano holds a PhD in Computers Network Security, which he earned under the supervision of the University of Girona (Spain) and Kansas State University (United States). He earned an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Girona (Spain), while doing research stays at UC3M (Spain) and DTU (Denmark). He initiated his research career while finalising his BSc in Computer Engineering at Strathclyde University (UK).

Dr Manzano is a member of the executive team of a start-up that leverages machine learning, among other key technologies, to improve traditional agricultural processes.