Bart Preneel received the Electrical Engineering degree and the Doctorate in Applied Sciences from KU Leuven. He is currently full professor (gewoon hoogleraar) at KU Leuven and heads the COSIC group. He was visiting professor at the Danish Technical University (DTU) (2007), TU Graz (1997-2006), the University of Bergen (1997-2001), Ruhr-Univ.t in Bochum (2001-2002) and at the University of Ghent (1994-2002). He was a scientific advisor at Philips Research in the Netherlands. During the academic year 1993-1994, he was a research fellow of the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. His main research interests are cryptology, cybersecurity and privacy.
He has authored and co-authored more than 400 scientific publications and is an inventor of five patents. He has served as a member of the Editorial Board of five journals and has served as program chair of 20 conferences including Eurocrypt, CHES, FSE, ESORICS and Financial Cryptology. He has been an invited speaker at more than 120 conferences in more than 40 countries. He has testified multiple times for the European Parliament. In 2014 he received the RSA Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics, in 2016 he received the Kristian Beckman Award from IFIP TC11 and in 2018 he received the ESORICS Award for Outstanding Research.
He has been project manager of the European CSA ECRYPT and the Marie-Curie Integrated Training Network ECRYPT. He has been active in standardisation since 1989; he has edited five international standards.
Bart is president of LSEC and has been president of the IACR (International Association for Cryptologic Research). He is a fellow of the IACR, a member of the Permanent Stakeholders group of ENISA (European Network and Information Security Agency) and of the Academia Europaea. He frequently consults for the technology and financial sectors and is involved with several start-ups in the area of e-security.