Gildas Avoine is professor of applied cryptography and information security at the UCL in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium), in the Department of Computing Science and Engineering. Before joining the UCL, he was researcher at the MIT (USA) hosted by Ron Rivest in the CSAIL, and at the EPFL (Switzerland) in the LASEC headed by Serge Vaudenay, where he obtained a PhD degree in cryptography. Previously, he studied at the University of Caen (France) where he received a Bachelor degree in mathematics and Bachelor and Master degrees in computer science.

Gildas Avoine is also an independent expert in cryptography and information security. He leads training and consulting for companies, especially in his favorite field that is radio-frequency identification (RFID).