On October 16, the prestigious Hedy Lamarr Prize of the City of Vienna was awarded to Zeta Avarikioti for her work in interoperable blockchain infrastructures.

The City of Vienna awards the Hedy Lamarr Prize every year together with DigitalCity.Wien, an initiative of the climate and innovation agency UIV Urban Innovation Vienna. The prize is endowed with EUR 10,000 and is presented during a ceremony at the Digital Days.

“It is a great honor for me to receive the Hedy Lamarr Prize of the City of Vienna. But if we really want to honor Hedy Lamarr, then the next generation of women should not have to fight for a seat at the table. The door should already be wide open. As a young woman in the STEM field, I always had to reaffirm my place—first in civil engineering in Athens, later in computer science. Today, I develop blockchain technologies because I believe in a future that is open, fair, and inclusive,” says Zeta Avarikioti.

Zeta is an Assistant Professor at the Research Unit Security and Privacy at TU Wien Informatics, and she leads the Blockchain Hub at TU Wien’s Cybersecurity Center. Her work focuses on designing secure, scalable, and interoperable blockchain protocols that make decentralized systems accessible, fair, resilient, and privacy-preserving. She began her academic career in Athens with a degree in civil engineering, followed by a master’s in logic, algorithms, and computer science. She wrote her PhD on blockchain scaling protocols at ETH Zurich.

Executive City Councillor for Cultural Affairs and Science Veronica Kaup-Hasler emphasized, “The research of women like Georgia (Zeta, ed. note) Avarikioti not only enriches science but also creates new innovations that contribute to a secure digital future in the spirit of digital humanism. With her work, Georgia Avarikioti has conducted pioneering scientific work that builds a bridge between theory and practice. Her diverse portfolio of publications in renowned journals and her collaborations with leading global institutions are impressive.”

Congratulations, Zeta, on this outstanding achievement!

Curious about Zeta? Learn more about her and her research in our #5QW interview series!

If you’re curious about the award ceremony and the Hedy Lamarr Prize, a press release (in German) has been issued by the City of Vienna.

About Zeta Avarikioti

Zeta holds a PhD in Distributed Computing from ETH Zurich and has previously held research positions at IST Austria and Columbia University. Her research has been published in leading venues such as CCS, USENIX Security, NDSS, and Financial Cryptography, and her contributions have influenced both academic theory and real-world systems, including the BitVM interoperability framework, which has seen rapid industrial adoption and development. Her work has been supported by competitive national and international funding, including an FWF, ESPRIT, and two WWTF projects. She currently serves on the program committees of top-tier conferences (CCS, USENIX Security, FC) and as Program Chair of the Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025) conference.

On the industrial front, Zeta Avarikioti is the Chief Scientist at Common Prefix, a consulting firm bridging academia and industry in blockchain innovation. At TU Wien, she leads the Blockchain Hub that fosters collaboration between researchers, students, and global technology partners to advance distributed ledger technology (DLT) research and development. In 2025, Zeta Avarikioti received the prestigious Hedy Lamarr Prize of the City of Vienna, awarded to outstanding women in technology.

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