He is a cybersecurity engineer, with 25 years experience at the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Between 2019-2025, he joined the European Security and Defense College (ESDC), which is part of the European External Action Service (EEAS), organizing cybersecurity and Intelligence activities/workshops for EU Member States or geographical areas with political interest in EU (like the Western Balkans, the Eastern Neighborhood, Ukraine, Armenia, Moldova, and others)
Since 2025, Panagiotis Marzelas works at the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre (ECCC) as Project Officer and was assigned to contribute to the PQC cluster activities. Most recently, he hosted a panel at the PQC conference “Beyond the Algorithm” in Bucharest.

Pieter Schneider works as Program Manager Quantum Secure Cryptography NL (QvC-NL) at the CISO Government Office of the Ministry of the Interior & Kingdom Relations. Pieter has a broad background in the security domain and cybersecurity. In his current role, he manages the QvC-NL program, which aims to help The Netherlands manage the risks of quantum technology on cryptography in time.

Elif Yesilbek studied Mathematics and Software Engineering, then completed her Computer Science master in information security, with focus on Cryptography. Currently she is working as a cryptographer and pursues her PhD in Cryptography. Her PhD thesis is about achieving crypto-agility as PQC becomes PKC, for fintech.

Dr Christian Fischer works at the DLR Project Management Agency for four years, where he works for the National Coordination Centre for Cybersecurity (NCC-DE). He is an expert on European funding programmes, particularly the Digital Europe Programme, acts as a funding adviser for start-ups and SMEs in the cybersecurity sector, and organises various events for NCC-DE. PQC plays an important role in the work of NCC-DE, as it represents the future of cryptography and European providers can still play significant roles in this field.

Affiliation: DLR Projektträger | National Coordination Centre for Cybersecurity Germany

Siebren Lepstra is currently working as Enterprise Architect PKI and chip technology at the Judicial Information Service as part of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. For the last ten years Siebren is involved in the field of PKI, chip technology, applied cryptography and, more recently, quantum technology. Quantum technology is evolving fast and poses significant risks to anything involving cryptography, including the travel documents we use every day.

For his master thesis, theory and field practice have been combined to take the first steps into adding post quantum cryptography into travel documents, specifically for passive authentication: the most important protocol for electronic travel documents used worldwide.

Kristof obtained a PhD in engineering sciences at the KU Leuven with research on cryptographic protection of privacy with anonymous credentials and zero-knowledge proofs. In this context, he won the best paper award at the International Conference on Security and Cryptography (SECRYPT). In 2011, he joined the research department of Smals, an IT service provider for the Belgian public sector.

His current domains are post-quantum cryptography, advanced identifier pseudonymization and fully homomorphic Encryption (FHE). In 2024, he was nominated for the Privacy Professional Award by Belgium’s Cyber Security Coalition.

In 2025 the Blinded Pseudonymization Service he co-developed for Belgium’s eHealth-platform received the runner-up (2nd) Award issued by Cybersec Europe for Best Cybersecurity Innovation Europe.