Nigel Smart received a BSc degree in mathematics from the University of Reading in 1989 and his PhD degree from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1992. He proceeded to work as a research fellow at the University of Kent, the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Cardiff University until 1995. From 1995 to 1997, he was a lecturer at the University of Kent, and then spent three years at Hewlett-Packard from 1997 to 2000. From 2000 to 2017 he was at the University of Bristol, where he founded the cryptology research group. From 2018 he has been based in the COSIC group at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

Nigel 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. In 2016 he was named as a Fellow of the IACR.

He carries out research on a wide variety of topics in cryptography and is known for his work in elliptic curve cryptography. He has also worked on pairing-based cryptography contributing a number of algorithms such as the SK-KEM and the Ate-pairing. His work with Gentry and Halevi on performing the first large calculation using Fully Homomorphic Encryption won the IBM Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award for 2012. In the last decade he has worked on making secure multiparty computation practical.

In addition to his three years at HP Laboratories, Nigel was a founder of the startup Identum, which was bought by Trend Micro in 2008. In 2013 he formed, with Yehuda Lindell, Unbound Security, which was sold to Coinbase in 2022. He is also the co-founder, along with Kenny Paterson, of the Real World Cryptography conference series.