Hedy Lamarr Prize
The Hedy Lamarr Prize is the City of Vienna’s annual award (since 2018) honoring outstanding women researchers in IT; it is presented in cooperation with DigitalCity.Wien and Urban Innovation Vienna and is endowed with €10,000. The prize is named after Vienna-born Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr, who ‒ together with composer George Antheil ‒ patented a wartime “secret communication system” based on frequency hopping, a forerunner of modern spread-spectrum techniques used in today’s wireless technologies. The award not only recognizes scientific excellence but also celebrates role-model impact
Georgia Avarikioti, Assistant Professor at the Research Unit Security and Privacy, TU Wien Informatics, and head of the TU Wien Blockchain Hub, has been awarded the 2025 Hedy Lamarr Prize of the City of Vienna. “It is a great honor for me to receive the City of Vienna’s Hedy Lamarr Prize. But if we truly want to pay tribute to 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,” Avarikioti said at the award ceremony.
Avarikioti’s research advances the foundations of secure, scalable, and interoperable blockchain systems. Her current projects ‒ Scalable, Private, and Interoperable Layer 2 (SCALE2) and Optimal Cross-Chain and Cross-Layer Protocols (CROSS) ‒ are funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) and target some of the field’s most pressing challenges: performance at scale, privacy guarantees, and seamless interaction across blockchain layers and networks.
Blockchain technology has become a key building block of today’s internet infrastructure. While best known for powering cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, blockchains also support a growing range of sensitive applications ‒ from privacy-preserving digital payments to the management of complex supply chains. Avarikioti’s work takes a rigorous, systems-engineering approach to realize what the technology can reliably deliver: secure, censorship-resistant, and universally accessible platforms for exchanging information and value.
In her interview with #5QW, Georgia shares her vision: her team is designing financial and data systems from the ground up ‒ principled, transparent, privacy-preserving, secure, and efficient ‒ to return custody and control of money and data to users. Beyond finance, her group explores how decentralized architectures can support governance, auditing, and community decision-making ‒ core components of more democratic digital services.
Georgia Avarikioti’s journey ‒ from studying civil engineering in Athens to earning a PhD at ETH Zurich on blockchain scaling protocols, and pursuing research that bridges computer science and economics ‒ has shaped her interdisciplinary agenda and her commitment to inclusive excellence in STEM. Today, she mentors a growing team of early-career researchers and works not only to bring more women into technical fields, but also to change the culture so that women feel included, supported, and able to thrive.
Also read: Georgia’s interview with futurezone – “Blockchains werden sichere politische Wahlen ermöglichen.”
