Dr Ciara Rafferty is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Secure information Technologies, where she leads research into advanced cryptography and data security.  She was a post-doctoral Research Fellow in the H2020 SAFEcrypto project on quantum-safe cryptography.  She is Assistant Director, Co-I and QUB lead on the UK Integrated Quantum Networks (IQN) Hub.  She was Co-I and QUB lead on Phase 2 of the UK Quantum Communications Hub (2019-2024) and Co-I on the Innovate UK AQuASeC project led by Toshiba Europe Limited (Nov 2018- Sept 2020) and the Rolls Royce funded project SEQURED (Nov 21-Nov 22). She is a senior member of IEEE and an EPSRC SPRITE+ Expert Fellow. 

Her research interests include homomorphic encryption, post-quantum cryptography, privacy-preserving technologies and hardware acceleration and optimisation of cryptosystems.

Currently co-teaching the EEECS stage 2 UG module CSC2056 - Systems Security and Cryptography (20CATS)