Stefan Lucks
German cryptographer in Weimar who helped build Skein and then turned to making password hashing deliberately slow.
Lucks is a professor at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. His early reputation came from cryptanalysis: in 1998 he showed that triple DES could be attacked with considerably less work than the naive estimate, a useful reminder that three layers do not buy three times the security.
He was part of the team around Bruce Schneier and Niels Ferguson that submitted Skein and the Threefish block cipher to the SHA-3 competition in 2008. Skein made the final round and lost to Keccak in 2012. Lucks then moved on to passwords and co-designed Catena, which received a special recognition in the Password Hashing Competition. The common thread is making things hard in exactly the right place.