As BSidesPDX has evolved over the years into a larger event, the process of curating the content has evolved as well. In an effort to recognize that the goal of BSidesPDX is to support the local information security community, we’ve recruited a set of local experts to help with the selection process.

Michael Leibowitz

Michael Leibowitz (@r00tkillah) has done hard-time in real-time. An old-school computer engineer by education, he spends his days hacking the mothership for a fortune 100 company. Previously, he developed and tested embedded hardware and software, fooled around with strap-on boot roms, mobile apps, officesuites, and written some secure software. On nights and weekends he hacks on electronics, writes CFPs, and contributes to the NSA Playset. He is the chairman of our CFP this year.
Marion Marschalek

Marion Marschalek is a security engineer at a large cloud provider, and enjoys reverse engineering and all things binary analysis. With some background in malware analysis, incident response and microarchitecture security, her interests are quite varied. In 2015 Marion founded BlackHoodie, a series of hacker bootcamps which successfully attracts more women to the security industry. In her sparetime she runs, hikes, mountain bikes and swims laps in mountain lakes.
Wu-chang Feng

Wu-chang Feng is a professor of Computer Science at Portland State University where he helps students learn about cybersecurity topics such as generative security application engineering, web application exploitation, cloud security, reverse engineering, fuzzing, and symbolic execution.

Gabriel Gomes

Gabriel Gomes is a security researcher at Intel. He started his career as a telecom hardware designer for small companies but later migrated to software development and big enterprises. Because of this transition and his work with virtual machines, binary translators, compilers, system libraries, and even software distribution, one could say that he is all over the place, which he thinks is a good thing. Gabriel is particularly fond of his contributions to Glibc and user-space live patching, and is very happy to be a Debian Developer. His work at Intel revolves around memory safety and CPU security.

João Moreira

João Moreira is a systems security researcher passionate about compilers, OS internals, and digging deep into low-level bugs. At Microsoft, he works on securing cloud infrastructure by reviewing service designs, building secure architectures, and developing defenses against emerging threats. Prior to Microsoft, João worked at Intel, SUSE Linux, and spent time in academia, where he focused on low-level systems topics like control-flow integrity and binary livepatching. His research was presented at conferences such as Black Hat Asia, the Linux Plumbers Conference, and the Linux Security Summit. Every now and then, João contributes to open-source projects like the LLVM compiler and the Linux kernel. More recently, he’s been trying to figure out this AI thingy — but he still struggles to write short conference bios with the help of chatbots.

Allison Naaktgeboren

Allison Marie Naaktgeboren is a PhD candidate at Portland State University advised by Dr. Andrew Tolmach on a Draper Scholars fellowship. Her research agenda is to make security tools more practical & pragmatic; she hopes to atone for all the security sins she committed over the years as a developer at Draper Labs, Signal Sciences, Mozilla, FactSet Research Systems, Amazon, and Cisco. Her current focus is improving the quality & actionability of fuzzer bug reports and expanding fuzzer bug detection beyond memory safety to higher level classes using formal methods. She holds a Masters in Computer Science & Cybersecurity from Portland State, a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. She is a founder of PSU’s CTF team, the void* vikings, has volunteered with BSidesPDX since 2017, and led the BSidesPDX CTF in 2024.