ECCA Conference 2025 Keynote Announced

We are very honoured and pleased to announce that Mr. Klaas Wierenga, Chief Information & Technology Officer for the GÉANT Association, will be this year’s keynote speaker. In the keynote address, some of the main topics will include student mobility, the impact of eduroam on campus Wi-Fi access, insights into the @EUDI-Wallet, and the work of the Open Wallet Foundation on credentials.

Mr. Klaas Wierenga, GÉANT

Klaas is the Chief Information and Technology Officer at GÉANT, where he oversees the Trust & Identity, Security, Cloud, Product Management, Software Development, and IT teams.

He has a strong background in innovation management, focusing on identity, mobility, and security. Before joining GÉANT, Klaas served as a senior consulting engineer and identity architect in both Cisco Systems’ Research and Advanced Development group and its Cloud Infrastructure Services group. Prior to that, he was an innovation manager and managed Middleware services at SURFnet, the Netherlands' National Research and Education Network (NREN). During his time at SURFnet, Klaas developed the first generation of federated identity systems and created the eduroam service, which provides WiFi roaming for research and education.

In 2012, Klaas received the first GÉANT (formerly TERENA) Community Award for his work on eduroam. He has chaired the GÉANT Task Force on Mobility for over ten years, led the IETF Abfab working group, been a member of the IETF Security Directorate, and served on the TNC programme committee as both a member and chair.

Klaas is a co-author of "Building the Mobile Internet" (Cisco Press, 2011) and "Wireless Networking in the Developing World" (2013), along with three RFCs. He also holds five US patents.

Currently, Klaas is involved in the DC4EU project, where he is a member of its strategic committee —one of four Large Scale Pilots for the EU Digital Identity Wallet. 

In September 2019, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in recognition of his invention of eduroam, the global WiFi roaming service for research and education.