Dr. Vincent Rijmen was born in 1970, in Leuven, near Brussels, Belgium. In 1993, he obtained a degree in electronics engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U. Leuven). Afterwards, he was a PhD student at the ESAT/COSIC lab of the K.U. Leuven. (COSIC stands for COmputer Security and Industrial Cryptography.) In 1997, Rijmen finished his doctoral dissertation titled "Cryptanalysis and design of iterated block ciphers."
After his PhD he did postdoctoral work at the COSIC lab, on several occasions collaborating with Dr. Joan Daemen. One of their joint projects resulted in the algorithm Rijndael, which in October 2000 was selected by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to become the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).
Since 1 August, 2001, Vincent has been working as chief cryptographer with Cryptomathic. Since May 2001, Vincent is also a visiting professor at Graz University of Technology (Austria).
