Technical Advisory Council

The Technical Advisory Council (TAC) provides oversight of the Post-Quantum Cryptography Alliance technical communities. Its functions include:

Approving new proposals for project lifecycle changes
Establishing community norms, workflows, or policies that are not within the scope of any single project
Resolving technical matters that affect multiple projects
Coordinating cross-project opportunities

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TAC Representatives

Cisco

Norman Ashley

Norman Ashley is a Technical Lead Engineer at Cisco Systems in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. At Cisco, he develops libraries that enable others to implement security features within various products. He is also a contributor to the Open Quantum Safe project and sees its progression into the Linux Foundation as an opportunity to benefit the greater community.

Norman enjoys helping and seeing organizations fulfill their mission and live out their values. It is his belief that the highest form of serving is through agape.

A devoted husband to his wife, an ever-present Dad to his daughters, family time is priority. An avid footballer, Norman dreams of someday playing in a coed league with his daughters. Also, at some point to be tolerated by either of them on the tennis court as their doubles partner. A favorite quote and principle is “Being rather than seeming.”

IBM

Michael (Max)imilien

Max (or Dr Max) is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and leader for the OSS teams contributing to all things open Quantum and Serverless.

Previously, Max was a principal engineer at IBM RTP for the worldwide point-of-sale standard: JavaPOS. Then at IBM Research-Almaden, he was a research scientist and did pioneering work on cloud computing and platform-as-a-service.

Max joined the IBM Cloud Labs in 2014 as Chief Architect for Cloud Innovations, leading IBM’s team for Cloud Foundry OSS then Knative/Kubernetes. As of 2024 Max rejoined IBM Research to help lead the quantum services, quantum open source, and quantum safe.

Max’s main expertise are in software engineering and distributed systems. Max published 100+ refereed papers with citations of 7500+ on GoogleScholar, 100s of blogs, and hold 21 issued patents. Max is an avid amateur photographer and triathlete; bragging rights: 2 award winning photos with Leica Society in 2021, 10 half Ironman, one full Ironman, and 20+ marathons.

Max has a master’s and PhD degrees in computer science and various executive certificates in AI and quantum.

Google

Sophie Schmieg

Sophie Schmieg is a cryptography engineer at Google, where she leads the ISE Crypto team. As part of her work in ISE Crypto she is responsible for Google’s transition to post-quantum cryptography.

Sophie has a PhD in algebraic geometry from the university of Ulm.

Amazon Web Services Inc.

Brian Jarvis

Brian Jarvis is a Software Development Manager at Amazon Web Services. There, he leads the post-quantum cryptography team which is focused on Amazon’s migration to PQC. He also spent time as a developer and manager within AWS Security. Brian is an alumni of the Cryptographic Engineering Research Group at George Mason University and Vanderbilt University.

SandboxAQ

Thomas Bailleux

Thomas is a cryptography software engineer at SandboxAQ.
He was previously an offensive security researcher.

OQS TSC Chair

NVIDIA

Yarkin Doroz

Yarkin Doroz is a Product Manager for PQC/FHE libraries at NVIDIA. He is responsible for driving strategies, roadmaps, and priorities to build and continuously improve software products for Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) and Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC).

Yarkin holds a PhD in cryptography from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and he briefly worked as a Research Scientist at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Later, he worked as a professor and a co-founded a PQC startup before joining to NVIDIA.

IBM

Nigel Jones

A software engineer at IBM Quantum and have been working in open source development for the last 8 years, including with Linux Foundation projects (and more years before this on proprietary/consuming).

I started in Quantum-safe crypto mid 2023, and delivered education material on PQC before getting more closely involved in the PQCA including discussion prior to its formation, and join the PQCA TAC Meetings where I’ve started activities in workgroups. I’m also engaged in open quantum safe activities, regularly attending the TSC and development calls.

PQ Code Package TSC Chair