Professor Máire O’Neill has a strong international reputation for her research in hardware security and applied cryptography.
Prof O'Neill is currently Acting Director of ECIT and Director of the £5M EPSRC/NCSC-funded Research Institute in Secure Hardware and Embedded Systems (RISE) and recently led the €3.8m EU H2020 SAFEcrypto (Secure architectures for Future Emerging Cryptography) project (2014–2018). She previously held a UK EPSRC Leadership Fellowship (2008–2014) and was a former holder of a UK Royal Academy of Engineering research fellowship (2003–2008). She has received numerous awards, which include a Blavatnik Engineering and Physical Sciences medal, 2019, a Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal, 2014 and British Female Inventor of the Year 2007.
She has authored two research books, and over 150 peer-reviewed international conference/journal publications.
Professor O’Neill has significant expertise in the design of high-speed and lightweight security architectures, physical unclonable functions (PUFs), side channel analysis and applied quantum-safe cryptography. Her early research into high-speed AES hardware architectures was successfully commercialised by Amphion Semiconductors, Belfast, and utilized to provide security in their set-top box chip sets. Collaborative research with ETRI, South Korea, on a novel security architecture for Electric Vehicle (EV) charging systems was licensed by LG-CNS. She is an Associate Editor for IEEE TC and IEEE TETC and is secretary of the IEEE Circuits and Systems for Communications Technical committee. She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Irish Academy of Engineering.