Computer Scientist, Cryptography and Security Expert Awarded Sloan Fellowship

AUSTIN, Texas—Brent Waters, assistant professor of computer science at The University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded a 2010 Sloan Research Fellowship.

Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded every year by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise. The two-year fellowship will provide Waters with funds to support his research.

Waters’ research is laying the foundation for managing encrypted computer data in cloud services, where data is stored at third-party locations outside of the owner's control. Third-party storage sites are high value targets for an attacker, and Waters’ research is helping build an entirely different vision for encryption, called functional encryption.

Waters received his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University in 2004. From 2004-2005, he was a post-doctoral at Stanford University then worked at SRI as a computer scientist in the Principled Systems group.

In 2008 he joined the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. He is a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow and recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award.