PhD School Program

Georgios Smaragdakis is a Professor of Cybersecurity at Delft University of Technology, currently appointed as a visiting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is also a researcher with the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data. In the past, he held research positions at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative, TU Berlin, Boston University, and at research labs, including Akamai, Deutsche Telekom Labs, and Telefonica Research. His research was awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie International Outgoing Fellowship, Best Paper Awards at USENIX Security, ACM SIGCOMM, ACM IMC, ACM CoNEXT, IEEE INFOCOM, and several prizes, including the 2025 USENIX Internet Defense Prize, IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prizes, “Best of Computer Communication Review”, and Communications of the ACM Research Highlights.

Vasileios Giotsas is a Research Engineer at Cloudflare, where he focuses on network measurements and telemetry, the risk assessment and mitigation of topological vulnerabilities of critical Internet infrastructures, and the analysis of Internet routing policies and performance. He also holds a position as Lecturer at the Computer and Communications department of Lancaster University, and has previously worked as a research scientist at the Internet Measurement and Analysis group of TU Berlin and as a postdoctoral researcher at CAIDA, University of California San Diego. His work has been distinguished with the CoNEXT 2015 Best Paper Award and the IETF Applied Networking Research Prize 2016.

Oliver Gasser is Head of Research at IPinfo, having previously led the Internet Security Measurements research group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, where he received his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Munich in 2019. His research interests span Internet measurements, network security, IPv6, and DNS, and he has received the ACM IMC 2017 Community Contribution Award and the IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize, among other distinctions.

Mariano Scazzariello is a Senior Researcher at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and a maintainer of the Kathará Framework. His research mainly focuses on high-speed networking and programmable networks. He received his PhD in Computer Networks from Roma Tre University, where he co-developed Kathará, an open-source container-based network emulation system that has become a widely adopted tool for research, education, and operational testing.

Gerardo Viviers is a Senior Learning & Development Officer at the RIPE NCC. He delivers training courses and webinars for RIPE NCC members, as well as LEAs and governmental organizations. Before joining the RIPE NCC in 2009 as an IP Resource Analyst (IPRA), Gerardo worked at several Internet companies in Argentina and the Netherlands providing technical support and training.

Ondřej Caletka is a Senior System Engineer at the RIPE NCC, where he is a technical expert in the Learning and Development team. His main responsibility includes developing and operating the lab environment for training courses and online learning. Ondřej graduated from Czech Technical University in Prague and worked as network services administrator and developer for the Czech national research and education network CESNET before joining the RIPE NCC. He is also active in local IT communities around open source/free software, and acts as an IPv6 and DNSSEC ambassador, delivering talks and trainings at various events.