Dr. Christoph F. Strnadl is CTO and a Secretary General of the Gaia-X European Association for Data and Cloud AISBL, an international Brussels-based organisation defining and implementing standards to enable federated and trusted data and digital service ecosystems.

Educated as a research scientist in Theoretical Physics, he worked as a strategy consultant and business manager at Atos for 10 years. He then joined Software AG in 2005 where he held various technical leadership positions in central and eastern Europe and at the global level, finally as Deputy CTO. In this role, Christoph played a key role in global technology strategy development, cross-product innovation, and thought leadership. He contributed to large-scale, high-impact initiatives, including Gaia-X, Mobility Data Space (MDS), and various IoT and data space projects. Before joining the Gaia-X AISBL in 2024, he led the efforts of the IOTA Foundation, a Berlin blockchain/DLT association, in defining and implementing a technology adoption department.

An Austrian citizen, he holds a summa cum laude Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the Technical University of Vienna and a post-graduate certificate in management science from the University of Huddersfield, UK. He is a recognised public speaker with over 300 appearances and is co-author of, or contributor to several books on the cloud-to-edge (C2E) continuum and its monetisation, data and service platform concepts and implementations, business process management, and IT law.