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 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 20 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, 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 and CARDIS'20. I am the program chair of RAW'21. I am (co-)author in over 100 publications in international journals, conferences and books. I received best paper awards and nominations at CHES'19, AsianHOST'17 and DATE'16. I serve as an expert for the European Commission and as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security and IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine.


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