Ingrid Verbauwhede
Belgian hardware security researcher at KU Leuven who works on building cryptography into silicon without the physics leaking the keys.
Verbauwhede leads the hardware side of the COSIC group in Leuven — the same environment that gave the world AES through Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen. Her field is what happens after the algorithm is chosen: low-power cryptography for embedded systems, circuits that resist power analysis and other side channels, and physically unclonable functions (PUFs) that give every chip its own fingerprint.
The work picks up the problem Paul Kocher put on the table in the 1990s: a mathematically sound algorithm helps little if the power draw tells you what it is computing.