Christian is a professor of computer science at the University of Bern, where he has been leading the Cryptology and Data Security Research Group since 2019. Before that, he worked for IBM Research, Zurich, for over 20 years. Christian has held visiting positions at MIT and EPFL and has taught at several universities during his career in industrial research.

He holds a PhD from ETH Zurich and is a Fellow at ACM and IEEE. He has received multiple IBM Outstanding Achievement Awards and served as the President of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (2014-2019). He is interested in all aspects of security in distributed systems and especially in cryptographic protocols, consistency, consensus, blockchains, and cloud-computing security. He has developed many cryptographic protocols, particularly for achieving consensus and executing distributed cryptographic operations over the Internet. In cloud computing, he has contributed to standards in storage security and developed protocols for key management.