We congratulate Echo Meißner on their successful award of a doctoral degree.

Echo Meißner, PhD student at our institute, completed their award of a doctoral degree on "Privacy Protection in Quantitative Empirical Research" on 14 October 2025 with "summa cum laude", which of course makes us particularly happy. In their dissertation, Echo focused on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, exploring a broad mix of cryptographic methods and technical security mechanisms such as Trusted Execution Environments. They integrated these elements into a complex overall system that enables empirical studies to be conducted with virtually no risk to the protection of personal data.