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Nora Trapp is an engineer at the Applied Social Media Lab, where she is deeply passionate about advancing privacy as a fundamental human right. With expertise in security and privacy – particularly in protocol design and mobile platforms – her work empowers individuals to communicate securely and protect their personal information in an increasingly connected world. Nora takes a user-first approach to engineering, ensuring the technologies she develops are both secure and accessible, without compromise.

As a founding engineer at Juicebox, Nora designed an open-source encryption key recovery protocol combining usability with novel cryptographic techniques to make encryption more accessible to all. She also served as a technical lead at the Signal Foundation, where she shaped projects such as usernames, group calling, and stories that helped Signal’s privacy promises reach a larger audience. At Signal, she additionally collaborated with members of marginalized communities, including women in Iran and Afghanistan, to develop privacy tools that enable safe communication under authoritarian regimes. Nora is deeply committed to fostering inclusive and creative communities.

She served as the long-term President of Double Union, a feminist hacker/maker space in San Francisco, and was a founding member of the Cape Cod Makers, a nonprofit that establishes maker spaces in schools and libraries while uniting the local maker community with events like the Cape Cod Mini Maker Faire. As a mentor, she strives to help others – particularly women in tech – advance their careers and achieve their goals.

Nora lives in Brookline with her wife, two cats, and dog, but often takes to the road to explore the country and live nomadically under the stars. In her free time, she enjoys exploring linguistics and spoken languages, dabbling in music, tinkering with tiny things, and otherwise expanding an ever-growing list of hobbies.