@dconnolly joined the Zcash Foundation in May 2019. Over the past four years, she has been a key member of the Foundation’s engineering team, helping it grow from two people to nine.
Deirdre has been a key contributor to the development of both the Zebra node and the Foundation’s FROST implementation. She co-authored the FROST specification (and will continue to contribute to that effort), and has served as a ZIP editor since 2020, helping steer Zcash through the lengthy and challenging NU5 upgrade.
Outside her work with the Foundation, Deirdre co-hosts the Security Cryptography Whatever podcast, and is fascinated by isogeny-based cryptography. She has also held a long-standing interest in quantum-resistant cryptography, and she has been tempted away from the Zcash Foundation by an opportunity to pursue this topic more deeply.
Her departure is bittersweet in that, while we are disappointed that her future career path lies outside the Zcash Foundation, we are pleased that she has found an opportunity that will allow her to further develop her talents as a cryptographer, and that she will continue to contribute to Zcash as a member of the Zcash Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board.
On behalf of the Zcash Foundation team members past and present, and the Zcash community as a whole, I want to thank Deirdre for her contributions to Zcash and the broader mission of financial privacy.
