Company leader
Erik Kangas
Founder and CTO
LuxSci
Erik Kangas is founder and chief technology officer of LuxSci, which he started in 1999 to sell web hosting and turned into a secure email and hosting company, including mail a clinic can use under HIPAA. He taught himself to program in grade school and earned a doctorate in computational biophysics at MIT.
Teaching Himself to Program
He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. In fifth grade he taught himself BASIC and Pascal, and as a teenager he learned assembly language and won first place at the Ohio high school state science fair for a programming language he wrote.
At Case Western Reserve University he earned undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics and was one of the youngest students admitted as a full collaborator on a large high-energy physics experiment. Five years later he earned a doctorate in computational biophysics from MIT.
Engineering at Akamai
After his doctorate he worked as a senior software engineer at Akamai Technologies, building and maintaining web applications and services. He was also a visiting professor of physics at MIT, collaborating on molecular dynamics simulations.
Founding LuxSci in 1999
He founded the company in 1999 to host database-driven websites, and as its chief architect he soon moved it toward security. "By 2002, we started focusing on security, and by 2005, we had our own trademarked SecureLine™ encryption technology," he said. When HIPAA made business associates accountable for patient data, LuxSci turned to healthcare clients, and it later added secure forms and protections for Google and Microsoft Office suites.
His design rule is to encrypt by default. "People who do email security often have to click a box to mark a message as secure. However, we flip that around and secure everything by default until a user says otherwise," he said. He lectures on messaging security, and as chief technology officer he has been adding machine-learning operations to that stack.
Away from LuxSci he races endurance events and has finished a full Ironman triathlon, along with numerous marathons and half Ironman races.