ELASTIC External Expert Advisory Board Members

Mike Bursell

Director of P2P Consulting & Development Ltd

Mike Bursell is the Executive Director of the Confidential Computing Consortium, having been involved since its foundation in 2019. He is one of the co-founders of the open source Enarx project and was CEO and co-founder of the start-up Profian.  He has previously served on the Governing Boards of the CCC and the Bytecode Alliance and currently holds advisory board roles with various start-ups.  Previous companies include Red Hat, Intel and Citrix, with roles in security, virtualisation and networking. He regularly speaks at industry events in Europe, North America and APAC and has a YouTube channel dedicated to cybersecurity education.

Professional interests include: Confidential Computing, the EU Cybersecurity Resilience Act (CRA), Linux, trust, open source software and community, security, decentralised and distributed systems, Web3, blockchain.

Mike has an MA from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from the Open University, and is author of “Trust in Computer Systems and the Cloud”, published by Wiley.  He holds over 100 patents and previously served on the Red Hat patent review committee.

Vera Stavroulaki

Co-Owner & Technology Developer at WINGS ICT Solutions, Greece

Dr. Vera Stavroulaki is a Technology developer and  Co-founder of WINGS ICT Solutions and the Managing  Director of diTTo BV – the Digital Twin company. She has 20 years of experience in EU funded research projects and in the design and development  of systems for diverse domains. At WINGS she is in charge of the development of the wi.CARE+ solution, which is oriented to the realization of digital health applications and also works for overseeing and contributing to the developments of other WINGS products.

She has actively participated in EU funded research projects of the FP7/ICT, FP6/IST and FP5/IST frameworks. She has been involved in numerous H2020 projects, was the Project coordinator of the H2020 DEDICAT 6G project and is currently the Project coordinator of the Horizon Europe SNS JU Confidential6G project. She has served as a co-coordinator of the IERC AC3 “IoT innovation and pilots” and as a Rapporteur of the Technical Report ETSI TR 102 684 “Reconfigurable Radio Systems (RRS); Feasibility Study on Control  Channels for Cognitive Radio Systems”. She has authored more than 100 publications in international journals and refereed conferences.

Antonio Escobar

Senior R&D Engineer at Infineon Technologies, Munich, Germany

Dr. Antonio Escobar is a seasoned project manager and research expert with over a decade of experience in the field of public funding projects and related activities.

He plays a pivotal role in a central organization of Infineon Technologies AG, where he brings a wealth of expertise in managing complex projects and fostering innovation through public-private collaborations, mainly in the area of cybersecurity and secure elements.

Stefano Salsano

Professor at University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy

Stefano Salsano is a Full Professor in the Electronic Engineering Dept. of University of Rome Tor Vergata. From 2018 to 2022, he has been the Coordinator of the Master’s Degree in “ICT and Internet Engineering” and of the Bachelor Degree “Ingegneria di Internet”.
He received his Laurea degree in 1994 (Univ. of Rome Tor Vergata) and his PhD in 1998 (Univ. of Rome “La Sapienza”). From 1997 to 2000, he was with CoRiTeL, a research institute on telecommunications, where he has been coordinator of the research activities in the IP-related area. In November 2000, he joined the University of Rome Tor Vergata as Assistant Professor.
He participated in 16 research projects funded by the EU, being Work Package leader or unit coordinator in 8 of them, technical coordinator in two of them (Simple Mobile Services, SCISSOR) and project coordinator in one (Superfluidity). He has been principal investigator in several research and technology transfer contracts funded by industries with a total funding of around 2 M€. He has led the development of several testbeds and demonstrators in the context of EU projects, most of them released as Open Source software. He is co-author of an IETF RFC and of more than 180 papers and book chapters that have been collectively cited more than 5000 times. His h-index is 36.