Christian Rathgeb who is a member of the da/sec group since June 2012 won the Award of Excellence 2012 for his PhD thesis „Iris Biometrics: Template Protection and Advanced Comparators“. During his PhD thesis Christian Rathgeb was a member of the Multimedia Signal Processing and Security Lab (WaveLab) at the University of Salzburg. The Award was granted by the Austrian minister for science and research.