Dr Basel Halak is the founder and director of the embedded system program at the University of Southampton, he has written over 70 refereed conference and journal papers, and authored two books, including the first textbook on Physically Unclonable Functions. Dr Halak received his PhD degree in Microelectronics System Design from Newcastle University in 2009; He was then awarded a knowledge transfer fellowship to develop secure and energy efficient design for portable health care monitoring systems. He joined Southampton University in 2011 where he continued pursuing his research on developing reliable and secure systems; he is currently a member of sustainable electronics and materials research group, as well as, the cyber security group.

Dr Halak has a long experience of the implementation flow of intergraded circuit from concept to silicon. His research expertise includes evaluation of security of hardware devices and development of appropriate countermeasures, he has recently organised a special session on this topic during the design and automation and test European conference (DATE), one of the most prestigious in this field, and he is also delivering a tutorial on the same topic during the upcoming DATE in March 2019. His research expertise also includes the development off mathematical formalisms of reliability issues in CMOS circuits (e.g. crosstalk, radiation, ageing), and the use of fault tolerance techniques to improve the robustness of electronics systems against such issues. Dr Halak he has successfully supervised six PhD students to completion and given over 10 invited talks on topics related to security and reliability.

Dr Halak serves in several technical program committees such as HOST, IEEE IVSW, ICCCA, ICCCS, MTV and EWME. He is an associate editor of IEEE access and an editor of the IET circuit devices and system journal. He is also member of hardware security working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).