“My Career as” is a series dedicated to exploring how specialists in very different fields – Cryptography, Software Engineering, Information Security, Hardware Engineer, Blockchain – mastered this transition.
Thanks to their first-hand experience, they share advice and hard truths providing inspirational examples to those who are pursuing niche studies and might be wondering about what professional outcomes will open to them in the future.
Nigel Smart is Chief Academic Officer at Zama.
Nigel is a world-renowned cryptographer, with a particular expertise in Fully Homomorphic Encryption and Multi-Party Computation. He completed his PhD in Pure Mathematics at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and then went on to a career spanning both academia and industry. He is a twice recipient of a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant and former Vice-President of the International Association of Cryptologic Research. A cryptography researcher and entrepreneur, Nigel can be found @smartcryptology.bsky.social and LinkedIn.
I started down this path with a mathematics undergraduate degree at university, then a PhD in Pure Mathematics.
My PhD involved combining pure mathematics with computer programming, and I started becoming interested in applying pure maths to the real world, so eventually transitioning to cryptography made a lot of sense.
To pursue this transition to cryptography I moved to Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Bristol in 1997, and then moved back to academics in 2000 in order to set up a cryptography research group at the University of Bristol. Since then I have been researching cryptography in academia and industry.
I’ve been fortunate enough to be in this environment for a while, and seeing the growth of a community I could be part of. Having a community is very important in this field, and I see some of the biggest milestones in my career so far strictly related to this. For example, I served as Vice President of the International Association of Cryptologic Research between 2014 and 2016, and I helped set up the Real World Cryptography conference in 2012 – which is now one of the largest cryptography conferences in the world.
Never underestimate how a simple solution can solve something, as opposed to something deep
Whereas I am still very involved in the research and academic environment, I also work in the private sector. Unlike academia, life at a tech startup has a refreshing amount of almost zero admin and politics. Thus one can spend more time on thinking about hard problems, as well as the joy of seeing your ideas turned into practice, and then hopefully product. This definitely has an impact on my daily routine as I read papers, think about problems which the product division has, and then try to apply the papers to the problems. This might involve just applying existing techniques, or working out how to adapt/modify the existing solutions to the problems that we as a company have.
Never underestimate how a simple solution can solve something better, when compared to a deeper solution. The simple solution may be looked down upon in the wider research community, but if it solves the problem in a simple way, it can actually have more impact than a deep solution.
Much like in the academic world, the learning never stops. You need to keep on top of the latest ideas, as well as understand the past. Sometimes an idea abandoned 20 or 30 years ago can suddenly have relevance due to a change in technology or application coming from another area. Indeed all of Zama’s cryptography (FHE, MPC and ZKProofs) were once considered totally theoretical, and never to be deployed in the real world. But with improvements to both mathematics and computer hardware these are now all fielded to solve real world problems.
To anyone passionate about cryptography, I would suggest learning both mathematics and computer science. Do not worry about what was historically called “Applied Math” (e.g. calculus, PDEs etc): in the modern world it is discrete math and probability which are the drivers behind the technology we use all the time. Programming is also vital. You can’t really understand something unless you try to implement it. Sometimes you implement something someone has written and you realise the author also did not realise something important. The combination of maths+practical computer science means you can ground the theoretical math ideas into a reality.
In my professional experience, cryptography is now strictly connected to privacy. For me, and for millions of users out there, privacy brings up the thought of pointless cookie forms and other impediments to the user experience on the web. This turns people off of using online services and platforms, and is counterproductive especially when considering how much our lives are going digital. We need privacy to be seamless and by default. We should be clicking on a privacy alert button when we want to do something which might break our privacy, not to confirm we agree to some legal statement we will never read, and which probably says “your data is ours”.
