Brent Waters is a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the Director of the Cryptography Lab at NTT Research. He graduated from the UCL in 2000, then completed a PhD at Princeton University in 2004. After this, he moved on to Stanford as a postdoc.

Overall, Brent was the first to propose Attribute-based Encryption (ABE) and also the first to outline functional encryption. He was also awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship in 2010, and, in 2015, he was awarded the Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work on ABE and functional encryption.

Brent's research has been cited over 68,700 times for his research work, and has provided a core foundation for cybersecurity to move towards methods that provide fine-grained data access.