Elonka Dunin is an experienced crypto expert, co-founder and co-leader of a group of cryptographers who are working hard to crack the final cipher on the famous Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters.  She maintains a list of the World’s most famous unsolved codes on her elonka.com site, and in 2006, published The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms. 

Bestselling author Dan Brown named one of the characters in his Da Vinci Code sequel, The Lost Symbol, after her. “Nola Kaye” is an anagrammed form of “Elonka”. 

Elonka was a member of the Board of Directors for the National Cryptologic Museum Foundation from 2012-2022, and is a lifetime member of the International Game Developers Association. For over two decades she was General Manager and Executive Producer at Simutronics in St. Louis, Missouri, making award-winning multiplayer, social, casual, and mobile games such as GemStone, DragonRealms, Modus Operandi, Alliance of Heroes, CyberStrike, Tiny Heroes, and One Epic Knight. 

In 2021, she was invited to give the TEDx talk “2000 Years of Ordinary Secrets“, and as a public speaker, Elonka regularly gives talks on her favorite subjects: Games, Wikipedia, cryptography, medieval history, Agile development, and geocaching.