Faculty for the Summer School is drawn from the chen.ist team — engineers and security practitioners who have worked for over fifteen years on digital infrastructure for European organisations across Craiova, Bucharest and Stockholm — and from a rotating cast of researchers, practitioners and alumni who return each year to teach. Most members of the faculty are working full-time elsewhere — in universities, in industry, or in public bodies — and join the school for a single week.
This is deliberate. Participants are taught by people who are doing the work they are being taught about, and who will return to it the week the school finishes.
Standing faculty
A small standing faculty — usually three or four people drawn from the Academy team and from long-term collaborators — is present for the whole of each cohort. They lead the morning lectures, anchor the workshops, and supervise the group projects.
The school is run by the chen.ist Academy’s education group, with Alin Mechenici as the responsible director. A complete list of standing faculty for the 2026 cohort, with short biographies, is published before each cohort opens for applications.
Visiting lecturers and workshop leads
Each cohort hosts roughly twelve to fifteen visiting lecturers and workshop leads. Their topics are confirmed in the months before the school and published in the programme handbook circulated to participants.
A representative selection from the 2024 edition included researchers in applied cryptography, engineers from European cloud providers, a senior incident responder from a national CERT, a journalist working on platform accountability, and two members of the European Commission’s digital infrastructure unit.
Invited evening guests
The evening series is the most varied part of the school. Past guests have included novelists, civil servants, founders of small open-source projects, and academics from outside the technology disciplines whose work bears on ours. Conversations are on the record but unrecorded.
A note on access
Faculty are present at meals, in the common areas of the campus and at the Friday colloquium. The school is small enough that every participant can expect a substantial conversation with most members of the faculty over the course of the programme.
A complete list of confirmed faculty for the 2026 cohort is published before each cohort opens for applications. Until then, please write to [email protected] for specific enquiries.