Çetin Kaya Koç received his Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from University of California Santa Barbara in 1988. His research interests are in cyber-physical security, cryptographic engineering, elliptic curve cryptography and finite fields, and deterministic, hybrid and true random number generators.

Koç is the founder of the Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems. The CHES Conference is the second largest cryptography conference and the premier forum for presenting scientific advances in all aspects of cryptographic hardware and security of embedded systems.

Koç is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cryptographic Engineering (JCEN), a quarterly journal covering all aspects of design and implementation of cryptographic hardware and software, including the research areas of the CHES Conference. Koç is also co-founder of two other conferences: International Workshop on the Arithmetic of Finite Fields (WAIFI) and Security Proofs for Embedded Systems (PROOFS). WAIFI is a forum of engineers and mathematicians interested in efficient software and hardware realizations of finite fields. On the other hand, the goal of the PROOFS workshop is to promote methodologies that increase the confidence level in the security of embedded systems, especially those that contain cryptographic mechanisms. Furthermore, Koç organized and chaired the Open Problems in Mathematical and Computational Sciences Conference, held in Istanbul in September 18-20, 2013, and Cyber-Physical Security Education Workshop, held in July 17-19, 2017 in Paris, France. 

Koç has been in the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Computers (2003-2008 and 2015-now) and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (2003-2007). He was a guest co-editor of April 2003 & November 2008 issues of the IEEE Transactions on Computers on cryptographic and cryptanalytic hardware and embedded systems. In 2007, Koç was elected as IEEE Fellow for his contributions to cryptographic engineering. Furthermore, Koç is an Associate Editor of the prestigious International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science since March 2016.

Koç is the co-author of the three books Cryptographic Algorithms on Reconfigurable Hardware, Cryptographic Engineering, and Open Problems in Mathematics and Computational Science, published by Springer in 2007, 2009, and 2014, respectively. In addition to contributing to 7 conference proceedings as co-editor, he has also authored or co-authored more than 200 scientific papers, and 13 US patents. Koç graduated 21 Ph.D. students and 40 M.S. students, and also directed research theses of 6 undergraduate students. He is among the top 3 scientists that supervised most doctoral theses in cryptography. His Google Scholar h-index is 45. Koç is among the top 100 Turkish scientists with most citations.

Koç was an Assistant Professor at University of Houston (1988-1992), Assistant, Associate and Full Professor at Oregon State University (1992-2007). He established Information Security Laboratory at Oregon State University, and received Award for Outstanding and Sustained Research Leadership in September 2001. Koç now has appointment in multiple organizations, and his research is funded by several institutions, performed within Koç Lab composed of postdoctoral researchers, PhD and MS candidates, and advanced undergraduate students.

(*) Koç is pronounced as “coach”.