Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Vlad Kolesnikov was a member of the technical staff in Bell Labs' Enabling Computing Technologies domain in Murray Hill, NJ. Kolesnikov has worked on cryptography and security since 2000. His current research interest is practical and foundational aspects of secure computation, especially of two-party computation. He has authored a number of papers and patent applications about improving and using garbled circuits, homomorphic encryption, and related techniques. His other interests include key exchange, especially its definitional aspects. Kolesnikov has been involved in the design and analysis of smart grid networks, storage area networks, wireless and biometric authentication, and other secure systems. He served on standards committees (WiMAX), and was and is a principal investigator on projects for the Office of Naval Research and Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 2006.