Ingrid Verbauwhede

Also known as Ingrid M.R. Verbauwhede, Ingrid M. Verbauwhede

Ingrid Verbauwhede is a professor at KU Leuven who designs secure hardware for cryptography, and her encrypted-computing research now reaches AI through the company Belfort. After a 1991 PhD at KU Leuven and IMEC, she became an associate professor at UCLA in 1998, then moved to KU Leuven's COSIC group in 2003 and became a full professor in 2007. She received ERC Advanced Grants in 2016 and 2021, the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award in 2017, an IACR fellowship in 2021 and the IEEE Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits in 2023. In 2025, she co-founded Belfort, a KU Leuven spin-off for accelerating encrypted compute that raised a €5 million seed round. She is a full professor at KU Leuven and Belfort's chief scientist, and Belfort's demos run AI models on fully encrypted data.

Now at: KU Leuven and Belfort
Badges: Founder
Bridge
Loyal

Timeline

1991

A KU Leuven doctorate

She earns a PhD in electrical engineering from KU Leuven and the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (IMEC) in 1991. Her dissertation covers VLSI design methodologies for application-specific cryptographic and algebraic systems.
1998

Associate professor at UCLA

She begins her academic career in 1998 as an associate professor at UCLA. Her earlier posts include UC Berkeley, as a postdoctoral researcher and visiting lecturer, and TCSI and Atmel Lab in Berkeley.
2003–2007

Professor at KU Leuven COSIC

She moves to KU Leuven in 2003, joins the COSIC research group, and becomes a full professor in 2007. At COSIC she leads the embedded systems and hardware group, and her work covers efficient hardware for the DES, AES and ECC algorithms and circuit-level defenses against side-channel attacks.
2011–2017

Cathedral grant and IEEE honours

She is elected to the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts in 2011 and becomes an IEEE Fellow in 2013. In 2016, she receives an ERC Advanced Grant of more than 2 million euros for the five-year Cathedral project on Post-Snowden circuits and design methods for security, which she coordinates from COSIC and iMinds. In 2017, she receives the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award for contributions to design methodologies for tamper-resistant and secure electronic systems.
2021

IACR fellow, second ERC grant

She becomes a fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research in 2021, cited for sustained contributions to cryptographic hardware and embedded systems and for service to the IACR. She also wins her second ERC Advanced Grant in 2021.
2023–2024

Pederson and EDAA awards

She wins the IEEE Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits in 2023, for contributions to energy-efficient and high-performance secure integrated circuits and systems. In 2024, she receives the EDAA Achievement Award.
2025

Co-founding Belfort Labs

She co-founds Belfort, a KU Leuven spin-off that accelerates homomorphic encryption, and serves as its head scientist. In September 2025, Belfort launches a hardware accelerator for encrypted compute and closes a €5 million seed round led by Vsquared Ventures, with Jeff Dean and Naval Ravikant among the angel investors.
As of October 2026

Chief scientist at Belfort

She is a full professor at KU Leuven and Belfort's chief scientist, and has led two ERC Advanced Grants. Belfort's demos run AI models on fully encrypted data, including a ResNet-20 image classifier that labels a photo under encryption in 139 ms.