Nigel Smart

Prof Nigel Smart is a cryptography researcher and entrepreneur. He is the Chief Academic Officer at Zama.

From 2000 to 2017, he founded and ran the cryptology research group at the University of Bristol, before joining COSIC at KU Leuven in 2018. In parallel, he founded several successful companies, including Identum (acquired by Trend Micro) and Unbound Security (acquired by Coinbase).

Nigel has held a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award, two ERC Advanced Grants, is an IACR fellow, and was a director and vice-president of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. He is also the co-founder of the popular crypto conference, Real World Crypto.