Smart Card prize awarded to chip card expert Gisela Meister of Giesecke & Devrient

Dr. Gisela Meister, chip card expert at Munich-based technology group Giesecke & Devrient (G&D), has received this years Smart Card prize awarded by research institute Fraunhofer Gesellschaft.The award is in recognition of Meisters creativity in promoting the secure deployment of smart card technology. This is the second time that the prestigious award has gone to a researcher at Giesecke & Devrient. In 1999, Dr. Franz Weikmann received the prize for his work on developing secure smart card operating systems. Gisela Meister is the 11th award-winner and, after Brigitte Nebelung of SRC, the second woman to receive the Fraunhofer Gesellschafts Smart Card prize. In his eulogy, Bruno Struif, SIT director of smart card research at the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, stressed that Meister has advanced the use of smart cards as personal security instruments. She has shown extreme virtuosity in developing cryptographic components and security functions for use in ever more complex application scenarios, Struif said. Meister has made a large number of expert contributions to national and international standardization activities, and participated in formulating the specification of the European digital signature application, which is to be deployed in Germany in connection with the electronic health card. Since 1994 she has been a member of the DIN Working Group on Smart Card Standardization and a member of the German delegation to the ISO Working Group on Smart Card Standardization, which is primarily responsible for drawing up chip card standards. Gisela Meister has made major contributions to the work of TeleTrust Deutschland, an organization devoted to promoting trustworthiness of information and communication technology, where she headed the Working Group on Smart Cards and Security Architecture for several years. She has also participated for a number of years in important standardization work at the European level, heading the eSIGN-K Working Group, which formulated the specification for the European signature card.