Congratulations to our key researcher Maria Christakis on receiving an ERC Proof of Concept Grant!

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July 3, 2026

We congratulate our key researcher Maria Christakis, and Head of the Research Unit Software Engineering at TU Wien Informatics, on receiving a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept Grant for her project CIRCUZZ.

The grant will support the development of an open-source tool for automatically testing zero-knowledge systems, a key technology for privacy-preserving applications, blockchain infrastructures, and secure digital identities. It will enable the team to transform research results into a practical, user-friendly tool for the software security community, strengthening the reliability and security of next-generation privacy-preserving technologies.

Maria Christakis is a researcher in software engineering and formal methods focused on improving software reliability and developer productivity. Her work spans automatic test generation, program analysis, and software verification, with the goal of creating tools that make programs easier to write, specify, test, and debug.

She received her diploma in Computer Science from the National Technical University of Athens in 2009 and her PhD from ETH Zurich in 2015. She has held research and faculty positions at Microsoft Research, the University of Kent, and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, where she led the Practical Formal Methods Group before joining TU Wien Informatics.

Her work has contributed to several research projects, including GreenBench, Nomos, and DLSmith, and she has received major distinctions such as an ERC Starting Grant, ERC Proof of Concept Grant, an Amazon Research Award, and a Google Research Scholar Award.

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