Nigel Smart is a professor at COSIC at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Chief Academic Officer at Zama.
[citation needed] From 1995 to 1997, he was a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Kent, and then spent three years in industry at Hewlett-Packard from 1997 to 2000.
Smart held a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award (2008–2013), and two ERC Advanced Grant (2011–2016 and 2016-2021).
He was a director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (2012–2014), and was elected vice president for the period 2014-2016.
[11][12][13] His work with Gentry and Halevi on performing the first large calculation using Fully Homomorphic Encryption[14] won the IBM Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award for 2012.