Alex Davidson

Alex Davidson is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department of FCT, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. His research is conducted in the fields of cryptography, privacy, and usable security mechanisms, particularly based in the Internet setting. He was awarded his PhD in 2018 by Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, for his thesis "Computing Functions Securely: Theory, Implementation, and Practice", and a Bachelors of Science with Honours in Mathematics (awarded First Class Honours) from the University of Warwick. His main research interests are in constructing and implementing novel cryptographic functionalities, and designing cryptographic tools with enhanced usability. Since being awarded his PhD he has worked as a Cryptography Researcher in Technology companies such as Cloudflare (2018-2020), and Brave Software (2021-2022). He also worked as a post-doctoral researcher affiliated with the Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas (LIP), working on the ERC-funded Fake News and Real People (FARE) project led by Joana G. Sá. Projects and achievements: He has published articles across a variety of top-tier academic conferences in cryptography and security. Alex has also been involved as an author of numerous standardisation efforts within the Internet Engineering Task Force, and is a listed author of RFC 9497 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9497/). His research has resulted in receiving two distinguished paper awards (indicated in the selected publications below) in 2018, and in 2022. In 2024, he has been successful in receiving funding for the project "CertiCoLab: Collaborative Laboratory for Investigating Certifiable Computation" from EEA Grants (Grace code: PT-BI095), which is a project that is being carried out in collaboration with Simula UiB, Norway.