Lea Gröber

Biography

Lea Gröber, PhD, is an ICSI-DAAD IFI Postdoctoral Fellow at ICSI, where she works with Dr. Serge Egelman on research in human-centered security and privacy.

Her research is driven by the goal of realizing a more secure, privacy-preserving, and inclusive Internet. To that end, her recent work pursues two interconnected threads: examining the socio-technical dimensions of securing Internet infrastructures, and understanding the barriers that hinder the secure and equitable use of Internet technologies — particularly for marginalized or underserved populations. 

Dr. Gröber earned her PhD from Saarland University and the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, where she was advised by Katharina Krombholz. Before joining ICSI, she spent a semester as visiting faculty at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan, where she deepened her engagement with research on technology access and security in the Global South. 

Her publications span top-tier venues in both security and human–computer interaction, including USENIX Security, ACM CCS, NDSS, and ACM CHI. 

Dr. Gröber brings a distinctly human-centered lens to security research, one that treats technical systems not in isolation, but as deeply embedded in the social, cultural, and political conditions of the people who use them. Her commitment to equity and inclusion shapes both her research questions and her methodological choices.

Publications

Areas of Expertise

• Usable Security and Privacy by Design

ICSI Activity