Dr Ayesha Khalid is a Lecturer in the Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT), School of Electronic Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EEECS) at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB).

Dr. Khalid leads the research in Post-Quantum Cryptography at CSIT.  She was a postdoctoral research fellow in the team @ CSIT leading the EU H2020 SAFECrypto (Secure Architectures of Future Emerging Cryptography, October 2015-June 2018, www.safecrypto.eu ). working on lattice-based post quantum cryptography schemes and their efficient and secure, software and hardware implementations (FPGA based). Major contributions included novel approaches to efficient and/or secure, software and hardware implementations (FPGA based) of lattice-based post quantum cryptography schemes, especially the highly cited work on the timing attack resilient implementations of Gaussian samplers.  She was the QUB lead on an Innovate UK Project, Agile Quantum Safe Communications (AQuaSec), contributing to the use of post-quantum cryptography in conjunction with quantum technology for secure quantum communications. Dr Khalid is a Co-I on a collaborative EPSRC funded UK Quantum Communications Hub (EP/N508664/-CSIT2), in which she made a crucial contribution to practical lightweight quantum resistant schemes by investigating approximation to reduce their resource consumption. Dr. Khalid is the Co-I of the project investigating practical post quantum cryptography funded by Rolls Royce collaborative agreement to join the Cyber Security Network projects with Carnegie Mellon and Purdue.

She is a senior member of IEEE (SMIEEE), member of International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), and member of the IEEE Technical Committee on VLSI Systems and Applications (VSA). She won the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst) scholarship award for her doctoral studies from North Rhine-Westphalia Technical University (RWTH) Aachen University, Germany, where she was awarded her PhD with Magna Cum Laude (with great honour) in applied cryptography from UMIC research cluster. She has been a technical reviewer for reputed journals including IEEE TCAS-1, TCAS-2, Embedded Systems Letters and TPC member of significant international conferences including VLSI-SoC, ISCAS, COSADE etc. She was invited to give tutorials/talks to international conferences, such as, Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL 2022), 9th ETSI/IQC Quantum Safe Cryptography Event 2023 and the Schloss Dagstuhl seminar at Germany. Her expertise lies in the design, optimization, and implementation of quantum secure cryptography hardware targeting embedded devices. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=YXQolr4AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao