Meredith L. Patterson is an independent researcher whose areas of expertise range from CS-related topics such as database design, data-mining algorithms, complexity theory, computational linguistics, information security, and privacy-enhancing technology systems; to synthetic biology, design of transgenic organisms using low-cost, build-it-yourself lab equipment, and human metabolic system studies; and speculative fiction as a published author of multiple short stories, mostly science fiction.

Meredith has a BA in Linguistics from the University of Houston and a MA in Linguistics from the University of Iowa. She is heavily involved with the DIYBio movement, and works on transgenic lactic acid bacteria. She co-founded the field of language-theoretic security research, which she used to successfully defeat such troublesome attacks as SQL injection with her "Dejector" library. Most recently, she presented the Biopunk Manifesto at a UCLA synthetic biology conference, and presented her work with Dan Kaminsky and Len Sassaman on breaking the Internet's certificate authority system (by creating usable, bogus certificates crafted to exploit ambiguity in X.509 parsing implementations using language-theoretic security analysis principles) at the Financial Cryptography 2010 conference.

Meredith lives in Leuven, Belgium. In her spare time, she knits, repairs cars, and hacks on open source software. This is her second Black Hat presentation.