Short bio

I obtained a master degree in electrical engineering (micro-electronics) at KU Leuven in 2003. Afterwards, I joined the COSIC group as a Ph.D. researcher under the supervision of Bart Preneel and Ingrid Verbauwhede. In 2007, I obtained a Ph.D. in Engineering Science with the title "Secure and Efficient Coprocessor Design for Cryptographic Applications on FPGAs".
From 2007-2014, I was teaching at KHLim university of applied sciences and affiliated to KU Leuven as a post-doctoral researcher. Since 2014, I am an associate professor at KU Leuven and an academic staff member of the COSIC research group. I founded the research group ES&S at the KU Leuven Campus in Diepenbeek, where I am teaching digital design and cryptology in the Faculty of Engineering Technology. In 2020, I joined LIACS at Leiden University as a full professor of applied cryptography and security. I was a visiting researcher at Ruhr University Bochum in 2013 and at EPFL in 2017.
I was/am the PI in around 25 finished and ongoing research projects with national and international funding. I serve(d) as a program committee member of renowned international conferences on security and hardware design, such as NDSS, USENIX Security Symposium, ACM CCS, Eurocrypt, Asiacrypt, CHES, ESORICS, DAC, DATE, FPL, ESSCIRC and ESWEEK. I was the general co-chair of FPL'17 and the program chair of EWME'18, PROOFS'18, FPL'20, CARDIS'20, RAW'21 and VLSID'22. I will be the program chair of DDECS'23 and ASAP'23. I am (co-)author in over 150 publications in international journals, conferences and books. I received best paper awards and nominations at DATE'16, AsianHOST'17 and CHES'19. I gave keynote talks at CryptoIC'20, NorCAS'21, CARDIS'21, ICT.Open'22 and FPL'22. I will give a keynote talk at SPACE'22. I serve as an expert for the European Commission and as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), IEEE Security & Privacy (S&P), and ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES). I am an associate editor-in-chief for IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine (CASM).


Contact details

Leiden University

e-mail: n dot mentens at liacs dot leidenuniv dot nl
phone number: +31 71 527 4799

Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science
Snellius
Niels Bohrweg 1
2333 CA Leiden
The Netherlands

KU Leuven

e-mail: nele dot mentens at kuleuven dot be
phone number: +32 11 75 17 62

Embedded Systems & Security
Wetenschapspark 27
3590 Diepenbeek
Belgium

imec-COSIC, ESAT
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, bus 2452
3001 Leuven
Belgium