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Top 12 Elite NFC Experts

nfc experts - Top 12 Elite NFC Experts

Near Field Communication (NFC) has evolved from a niche tech curiosity into a core enabler of modern digital experiences—from contactless payments and smart access control to implantable chips and IoT integration.

Behind this transformation is a global community of visionary engineers, ethical hackers, hardware innovators, open-source contributors, and executives shaping the future of NFC. Below is an updated and curated list of some of the world’s most influential NFC experts, recognized for their breakthroughs across secure hardware, biohacking, developer tools, and NFC standards.

  1. Amal Graafstra
  2. Michael Roland
  3. Wojciech Paprota
  4. John McLear
  5. Preeti Ohri Khemani
  6. Richard Grundy
  7. Karsten Nohl
  8. Nick Pelly
  9. Mohamed Awad
  10. Zoltan Kis
  11. Adam Laurie
  12. Samuel Ortiz

Now, let’s delve deeper into each of these remarkable developers:

Amal Graafstra

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Nationality: American

Amal Graafstra is a biohacker and entrepreneur known for pioneering the use of NFC implants in humans. He implanted an RFID chip in his own hand as early as 2005 and later authored the book “RFID Toys,” sharing his experiments.

Graafstra founded Dangerous Things (selling do-it-yourself implant kits) and VivoKey Technologies, which offers secure NFC implant solutions for payments and identity. A TEDx speaker and tech evangelist, Amal has been a high-profile advocate for “transhumanist” applications of NFC – showing how implantable chips can unlock doors, start cars, or even replace wallets. Under his leadership as CEO, VivoKey launched the first biocompatible NFC payment implant (Walletmor) and continues to push the boundaries of secure, human-embedded NFC use cases. Graafstra’s work has inspired a global community to imagine new frontiers for NFC in bio-augmentation.

Michael Roland

Nationality: Austrian

Michael Roland is a leading academic and developer in NFC technology from Austria. He co-authored “Applications and Technology of NFC,” widely regarded as a standard reference book on NFC communications and security.

As a researcher (Ph.D., Univ. of Applied Sciences Upper Austria), Roland has published extensively – including the book “Security Issues in Mobile NFC Devices” (2015) – and contributed to international NFC standards. He’s also a hands-on innovator: Michael developed the Android NFC TagInfo app (1M+ downloads) to help users analyze NFC tags in the wild. From pioneering host-card emulation prototypes to uncovering protocol flaws, his work spans theory and practice. Michael Roland’s blend of scholarly insight and practical tool-building has made him a top expert in NFC.

Wojciech Paprota

Wojciech Paprota - Top 12 Elite NFC Experts

Nationality: Polish

Wojciech “Wojtek” Paprota is the co-founder and CEO of Walletmor, the world’s first company to sell biocompatible NFC payment implants to consumers.

With a background in finance, Paprota came up with the idea from a sci-fi novel and turned it into reality: in 2020 he had the first NFC payment tag surgically embedded in his hand and successfully used it to pay for goods. Walletmor’s implant is a secure, ISO 14443-compliant NFC tag encapsulated in biopolymer, which Paprota and his team engineered to meet banking payment standards while being safe in the body. He has driven Walletmor’s partnerships with banks and regulators to make “tap-and-pay” implants a viable product. Paprota’s visionary work merges fintech and biohacking, putting him at the forefront of NFC innovation in the wearable/implantable devices space.

John McLear

Nationality: British

John McLear is the inventor of the NFC Ring, a smart ring with integrated NFC chips that gained global attention through a viral Kickstarter campaign.

Launched in 2013, McLear’s NFC Ring surpassed its funding goal by over 800% with thousands of backers. The ring contains two NFC tags – one for public data (outer side) and one for private data (inner side) – enabling users to unlock smartphones, doors, or share information with a simple knock of the hand. McLear not only created the hardware but also provided open-source software for customizing the ring’s functionality, fostering a developer community around wearable NFC tech. His work demonstrated a novel form factor for NFC and inspired a wave of NFC-enabled jewelry and wearables.

Preeti Ohri Khemani

Preeti Ohri Khemani - Top 12 Elite NFC Experts

Nationality: Indian

Preeti Ohri Khemani is a senior director at Infineon Technologies and a prominent engineer in the NFC semiconductor industry. She has over 15 years of experience in defining and developing secure NFC chips and solutions. Khemani serves as Director of Systems Engineering in Infineon’s Digital Security Solutions division, where she focuses on the design of NFC controllers and secure elements used in smartphones, contactless cards, and IoT devices. In 2019, Preeti was elected Vice Chairman of the NFC Forum’s Board of Directors – a recognition of her industry leadership. She has been an influential voice in advancing global NFC standards and ensuring security in NFC hardware. Preeti’s technical contributions and advocacy have significantly furthered the reliability and adoption of NFC worldwide.

Richard Grundy

Nationality: American

Richard Grundy is a seasoned NFC engineer and entrepreneur who founded Flomio, one of the earliest startups offering NFC hardware and developer tools.

He previously worked on NFC products at Motorola and Amazon, and has been an instructor at NFC Bootcamp and a contributor to “NFC For Dummies”. At Flomio (a TechStars-backed company started in 2011), Grundy led the creation of plug-and-play NFC readers (like the FloJack) and cloud APIs, simplifying NFC integration for thousands of developers. He continues to innovate in the NFC space as founder of PassNinja, focusing on NFC-enabled mobile wallet passes. With decades of hands-on experience and a passion for evangelizing NFC, Richard Grundy has been a driving force in making NFC technology mainstream for businesses and hobbyists alike.

Karsten Nohl

Karsten Nohl - Top 12 Elite NFC Experts

Nationality: German

Karsten Nohl is a renowned cryptographer and hacker whose work has had profound implications for NFC security. He first gained fame by cracking the encryption of the widely deployed MIFARE Classic contactless card, demonstrating in 2008 how the card’s proprietary Crypto-1 cipher could be defeated with relatively modest equipment.

As the founder of Security Research Labs (SRLabs) in Germany, Nohl has continued to examine and expose NFC/RFID vulnerabilities – including weaknesses in NFC-enabled SIM cards and car immobilizers. He has presented multiple times at Black Hat and other conferences, raising awareness about issues in NFC implementations. Karsten’s research (always conducted ethically) has pushed manufacturers to patch flaws and improve cryptographic protections. By highlighting “what not to do” in NFC security, Nohl has helped the industry build more robust systems.

Nick Pelly

Nationality: American

Nick Pelly was a principal software engineer at Google who co-created the NFC stack for Android smartphones. As one of Google’s “top NFC developers”, he helped introduce NFC reading/writing and peer-to-peer capabilities in Android Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich.

Pelly was the technical lead presenting Google’s famous “How to NFC” session at Google I/O 2011, where he demonstrated Android Beam and other NFC use cases. He also influenced key decisions on NFC APIs – for example, explaining in 2011 that Android would hold off on enabling card-emulation for third-party apps until standards were ready. Nick Pelly’s contributions ensured Android’s early adoption of NFC was developer-friendly and secure, paving the way for services like Google Wallet and today’s widespread NFC support in Android devices.

Mohamed Awad

Mohamed Awad - Top 12 Elite NFC Experts

Nationality: Egyptian

Mohamed Awad is a technology executive who has played significant roles in the NFC industry from the corporate side. He headed Broadcom’s NFC business unit in the early 2010s and served as Vice Chairman of the NFC Forum’s Board of Directors (2008–2014).

At Broadcom, Awad oversaw the development of combo connectivity chips (integrating NFC with Wi-Fi/Bluetooth) and drove NFC adoption in smartphones. He later joined Arm, where as an SVP he continued to influence IoT and connectivity strategies. Mohamed Awad’s blend of technical expertise and industry leadership helped push NFC forward during critical years of growth, including championing standardization and presenting NFC’s value at global forums. His efforts ensured that NFC features became standard in mobile chipsets and that industry players collaborated through the NFC Forum for interoperability.

Zoltan Kis

NFC should be simple enough for any web developer to use, not just hardware specialists.

Nationality: Hungarian

Zoltan Kis is a software architect at Intel who has significantly contributed to NFC technology through standardization and open-source projects.

Based in Finland, he has been an editor of the W3C Web NFC API specification, helping define how web browsers can interact with NFC devices. Kis’s work focuses on making NFC integration easier for IoT and mobile developers – he has worked on Linux NFC middleware (he was involved in MeeGo’s NFC stack) and has pushed for intuitive JavaScript APIs for NFC. He’s actively simplified IoT device provisioning using NFC and was credited with driving the implementation of Web NFC in Chromium. Zoltan Kis’s combination of low-level engineering and high-level API design has been key to bringing NFC capabilities to new platforms, including the web.

Adam Laurie

Adam Laurie - Top 12 Elite NFC Experts

Nationality: British

Adam Laurie (aka Major Malfunction) is a British hacker and open-source advocate who has spent decades exposing weaknesses in RFID and NFC systems. He created RFIDIOt (“RFID IO toolkit”), one of the first open-source software suites for reading and manipulating various RFID/NFC tags.

Laurie has demonstrated how easily passports and contactless credit cards can be “hacked” – for instance, cloning the data from an e-passport or skim-reading a tap-to-pay card using homemade equipment. As a white-hat researcher, he shares these findings to prompt improvements in security. Adam has presented on NFC/RFID hacking at Black Hat, DEF CON, and other conferences, and leads IBM X-Force Red’s hardware security testing globally. His work (often conducted in a farmhouse-turned-lab in the UK countryside) has been pivotal in highlighting the importance of encryption and protections for NFC-enabled devices and documents.

Samuel Ortiz

Nationality: French

Samuel Ortiz is an open-source trailblazer who integrated NFC support into the Linux kernel. A Principal Engineer at Intel’s Open Source Technology Center, he served as the Linux NFC subsystem maintainer for many years.

Ortiz developed the core NFC kernel drivers and the “netlink” API that allows user-space applications (like neard) to interface with NFC hardware on Linux. He also co-edited the early draft of the W3C Web NFC specification, bridging his low-level expertise to high-level use cases. Under Samuel’s guidance, Linux gained robust NFC capabilities around 2011–2013, enabling technologies like Android’s NFC support (on Linux-based systems) and Raspberry Pi NFC projects. His leadership in the kernel community and contributions to standards have been vital in ensuring NFC’s openness and availability beyond the Windows/Android ecosystems. Ortiz continues to influence container and IoT security projects, but in the NFC realm he is revered for “making NFC work” on open platforms.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

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