Short bio

Nele Mentens obtained a master degree in electrical engineering (micro-electronics) at KU Leuven in 2003. Afterwards, she joined the COSIC group as a Ph.D. researcher under the supervision of Bart Preneel and Ingrid Verbauwhede. In 2007, she obtained a Ph.D. in Engineering Science with the title "Secure and Efficient Coprocessor Design for Cryptographic Applications on FPGAs".
From 2007-2014, Nele was teaching at KHLim university of applied sciences and affiliated to KU Leuven as a post-doctoral researcher. In 2014, she became an associate professor at KU Leuven and an academic staff member of the COSIC research group. Since 2023, she is a full professor at KU Leuven. She founded the research group ES&S at the KU Leuven Campus in Diepenbeek, where she is teaching digital design and cryptology in the Faculty of Engineering Technology. In 2020, she joined LIACS at Leiden University as a full professor of applied cryptography and security. She was a visiting researcher at Ruhr University Bochum in 2013 and at EPFL in 2017.
Nele was/is the PI in around 25 finished and ongoing research projects with national and international funding. She served/serves 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. She was the general co-chair of FPL'17 and the program chair of EWME'18, PROOFS'18, FPL'20, CARDIS'20, RAW'21, VLSID'22, DDECS'23, ASAP'23 and FPL'23. She is (co-)author in over 150 publications in international journals, conferences and books. She received best paper awards and nominations at DATE'16, AsianHOST'17 and CHES'19. She gave keynote talks at CryptoIC'20, NorCAS'21, CARDIS'21, ICT.Open'22, FPL'22, SPACE'22, SAMOS'23 and ARC'24. She serves as an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS) and ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES). She is an associate editor-in-chief for IEEE Security & Privacy (S&P). She was an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS) from 2020-2023 and for IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD) from 2021-2024. She was an associate editor and associate editor-in-chief for IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine (CASM) from 2020-2023.


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 (LIACS)
Gorlaeus Building, room BM3.01
Einsteinweg 55
2333 CC Leiden
The Netherlands

KU Leuven

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

Emerging technologies, Systems & Security (ES&S)
Wetenschapspark 27
3590 Diepenbeek
Belgium

Electrical Engineering Department (ESAT)
Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC)
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, bus 2452
3001 Leuven
Belgium