Short Bio

Elena Pagnin is an Associate Professor at Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg (Sweden). Her research is focused on public key cryptography, the design of new secure protocols and transparency technologies. She is interested in data authentication, verifiable computations, user privacy and transparency. Her motto is: det är lätt att vara efterklok (it’s easy to be wise in hindsight). For more information visit: https://epagnin.github.io

Professional Biography

Elena Pagnin is an Associate Professor at Chalmers University of Technology (Gothenburg, Sweden) where she is the head of the Crypto Team. She holds 2 grants from the Swedish Research Council, and is an active member of a large VINNOVA project on The future ecosystem for quantum-safe health data.

Previously, Elena has been an Assistant Professor at Chalmers (2022-2026), an Associate Senior Lecturer at Lund University (2020-2022), a Post-doctoral Researcher in the crypto group at Aarhus University (2019-2020), and she completed her PhD at Chalmers (Göteborg, Sweden) in 2018 under the supervision of Prof. A. Sabelfeld and Prof. D. Fiore (IMDEA). Elena holds a Master’s degree in Applied Mathematics from University of Trento, Italy, in 2013, which won an award of merit; and a Bachelors degree in Pure Mathematics from University of Padua, Italy, 2010.

Her research is focused on cryptography and security, with a special interest for homomorphic cryptosystems, data authentication and privacy-aware solutions.

Pictures of Me

The world wide web owns a few pictures of me already, but should you need a 'recent' one you can use:

IEEE Style Biography

Elena Pagnin (IACR Member) received the B.S. Degree in Theoretical Mathematics from University of Padua, Italy, 2011; the M.S. Degree (cum laude) in Applied Mathematics from University of Trento, Italy, 2013; and the Ph.D. Degree in Computer Science from Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2018. Dr. Pagnin has been an Associate Professor at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, since October 2026, where she leads the Cryptography Team since 2023.

Prior to that, she was an Assistant Professor at Chalmers University of Technology from 2022 to 2026; an Associate Senior Lecturer at Lund University, Lund, Sweden, from 2020 to 2022; and a Post Doctoral Researcher at the Crypto Group at Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark from 2019 to 2020.

Her research interests include cryptographic primitives, provable security and secure protocols for privacy enhancing technologies.

Dr. Pagnin was a recipient of a ‘premio di merito’ (award of merit) for her master thesis work, of a ‘best paper award’ from IET Information Security Journal, a personal 1.6M SEK grant from ELLIIT, and two VR (Swedish Research Council) grants as PI for a total of 11M SEK (~1MEUR).