I am no longer taking on new PhD students. The following advice is therefore purely of historic interest, however, it may be useful advice to some people applying to other members of the cryptographic community for positions.

So you want to study with or visit me?

This page is general notes on PhD applications, internships or job applications to work with me. These are specific notes related to the work I do. It has been written to enable me to collate in one place all the questions which I answer for enquirys.

Internships

I do not offer general summer internships for students. Please do not email me with requests for internships, I get so many I am unable to respond to them all.

Post-Doc Jobs

Any post-doc jobs we have are advertised on the IACR web site. Please go there in the first instance.

Want to visit

If you are an existing researcher and you want to visit me to work on something, please first talk with me at one of the conferences I attend. If you are a PhD student then pass your request via your supervisor, assuming they already know me. Again we get so many unsoliciated requests I am unable to respond to all of them.

Prospective PhD Students

Generally I am after PhD students who can work in a combination of theoretical and practical cryptography. So I am more interested in your mathematical and/or theoretical computer science skills rather than any experience with security systems. I am after people with a subset of the following backgrounds; pure mathematics, computer science and generic skills. I elaborate on these below, note that I treat programming as a generic skill and not a property of a Computer Scientist.

Pure Math If you have done a Math degree I am interested in you having covered various subsets of algebra; for example Galois Theory, Number Theory (up to say class groups of number fields), Algebraic Geometry.
Computer Science If you have done Comp Science I am interested in what in theoretical computer science you have done; for example Complexity Theory (up to say the complexity classes IP and BPP), Formal Methods, Information Theory.
Generic Skills I expect students to be able to perform experiments using a computer; either using a language such as C/C++ or via an algebra systems such as Magma, Maple or SAGE. We also expect students to be able to give presentations and to be able to think on their feet.

In your application please highlight the background you have in the above areas.

If you have done a course on cryptography or a project please detail this. Pay particular attention to covering how much you have already covered. For example do you already know What IND-CCA means? What RSA-OAEP is? What a zero-knowledge proof is? What is meant by secure multi-party computation?

Describe in your proposal the research you want to do. This should be aligned to my interests, so read some of my recent papers. In other words do your homework on the place you are applying to. If you want to work on something which I am not interested in working on then your chances of success are close to zero.