Vanesa Daza is an Associate Professor in our Department. She was born in Barcelona, Spain (1976). She holds a degree in Mathematics at Universitat de Barcelona (1999) and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (2004). As part of her doctoral training, she visited research groups in cryptography at Università di Salerno (Italy) and Aarhus Universitet (Denmark). She worked as a researcher at the R&D Department of Scytl, an international crypto-based security company. In 2006, she joined Universitat Rovira i Virgili, first as a "Juan de la Cierva" Fellow, and afterwards as a lecturer. She joined Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 2008.

From an initial focus on rather theoretical cryptography, she has extended her knowledge and experience to rather applied cryptographic areas, making use of distributed cryptographic techniques to enhance security and privacy to different wireless networks scenarios, such as mobile ad-hoc networks or vehicular ad-hoc networks. Currently, her research is converging to the design of new cryptographic primitives to undertake these security and privacy challenges in emerging technologies. She has co-authored over 30 papers and she is the co-holder of two international patents, currently under exploitation.