Hey! I'm Sofía Celi, a cryptographic researcher and implementer from Quito, Ecuador (Yes!, in South America).
I live in Lisbon, and spend time and love in Amsterdam (and Asia, when I can escape to it) ;)

Pronouns: en: she/her/hers/herself; they/them, es: ella; elles, nl: zij/ze

I consider myself agender 🎩🍴👀💚🦢🛒🏴‍☠️ ! (but you can use the pronouns I listed anyhow)

I have always loved knowledge, discovering things and art in my life. I'm interested on the unconsciousness, history of religions, mathematics, languages, design, music, literature, software, cryptography, philosophy and much more. This because I think people can do and learn whatever they want, without the need of being specialized in one thing. I have always loved the idea of the Renaissance woman (or man, or what you feel like, if you like).

I originally studied (since very young) classical music and literature (with a bit of journalism and communication theory). Since very young, I got interested in video games and the Internet. I spent many hours at school designing websites and playing with MS-DOS. On the last year of my bachelor degree, I decided to self-learn how to program and how cryptography works. And so, the journey began...

I also love writing, composing and playing the guitar. I won some competitions on those categories. But, I think that competitions are not important. What is important is that you love what you do. Now, I only exercise the mentioned activities in a casual way. But I still love reading Joyce, Beckett, Derrida, Blanchot, Oé, Dávila Andrade, Borges, Cortázar, Nietzsche; I still love listening to Stockhausen, Ligeti, Beethoven and much more. So, ping me up if you want to talk about them...

For the past 7 years, I have worked on on design, research and implementation of cryptography and security. I have also researched around the topic and travelled the world talking about it. I used to lead the version 4 of the Off-the-Record messaging protocol (design and implementation), and that work was mostly designed by an amazing set of non-white non-male people. I'm currently working at amazing Brave, doing some nice cryptography! And, finally, I'm also studying at the University of London on my first Computer Science related degree. In previous times, I was part of the Research team at Cloudflare.

I'm very much interested in helping humans. I have worked with several organizations that help activists fighting for rights (generally, privacy and security rights, but also refugee and women rights) in Africa, South America, and Asia. On that same note, I'm also very interested in improving diversity in STEM and introducing intersectionality. But, specially, I'm interested in helping non-male people from South America, Africa and Asia specifically. I'm a big believer of intersectional feminism.

All of this experience and passion has allowed me to help humans in the best way I could. In my life, as we all do, I have made mistakes, but I'm a firm believer of the power of change, and I'm always self-changing and exploring. I love new experiences, so, if you want to invite me to cook mole, eat grasshoppers or climb mountains, play videogames, I'm very up for it.

If you are interested in my academic and professional background in an organised way, get my CV here or send me an email.