Jennifer Fernick

Jennifer Fernick is a computer scientist and Senior Staff Security Engineer at Google. She was previously the SVP & Global Head of Research at NCC Group, leading one of the largest and most prolific private-sector security research teams in the world, and was a founding Governing Board and Technical Advisory Committee member of the Open Source Security Foundation. In past roles, she was Director, Information Security at a large global financial institution, after a tenure as their Senior Cryptographic Security Architect. She spent four years as a PhD student at the University of Waterloo, as a member of the Institute for Quantum Computing and the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research, where her research focused on cryptography & quantum algorithms. Jennifer was a 2019 Technologist Fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason University. Her career has included designing and building satellite systems, working on bleeding edge cryptography research, building secure systems at massive scale, running incident response events for core pieces of critical infrastructure, and leading the development of global technology standards. She holds a Master of Engineering degree in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo, and an Honours Bachelor of Science in Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence from the University of Toronto. Jennifer spent multiple years as CFP Chair of Crypto & Privacy Village at DEF CON, and has served on the review boards of venues including USENIX CSET, USENIX Enigma, USENIX WOOT, multiple NeurIPS workshops, and IEICE Transactions Japan, and regularly keynotes or presents technical research at major technology conferences including European Conference on Machine Learning, DEF CON, O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence, RSA, the Linux Foundation Member Summit, and Black Hat USA. In 2025, she was named one of IEEE’s Top 30 Early Career Professionals in Computing.