Zardus is one of the hacking aces on Shellphish, the oldest-running CTF team in the world. He's been attending DEFCON since 2001, playing DEFCON CTF since 2009, and talking at DEFCON since 2015. Through this time, he also pursued a PhD in Computer Security, focusing on Program Analysis. The application of cutting-edge academic program analysis techniques to CTF (and, later, to his participation in the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge, where he led Shellphish to a 3rd-place victory and a big prize payout) gave Zardus a unique understanding of the actual capabilities of the state of the art of program analysis, which in turn drove his research and culminated in the release of the angr binary analysis framework and the Mechanical Phish, one of the world's first autonomous Cyber Reasoning Systems.