Rei Safavi-Naini is the NSERC/Telus Industrial Research Chair and Alberta Innovates Strategic Chair in Information Security, and a co-founder of Institute for Security, Privacy and Information Assurance at the University of Calgary serving as its Director until January 2019. Before joining the University of Calgary in 2007 as the iCORE Chair in Information Security, she was a Professor of Computer Science and the Director of Telecommunication and Information Technology Research Institute at the University of Wollongong  Australia.

She has over 400 published papers in journals and conferences, has served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (two times), ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC), IEEE Transactions on Secure and Dependable Computing, and is currently Associate Editor of IET Information Security and Journal of Mathematical Cryptology. She has served as Program Chair/co-Chair of numerous conferences, including Privacy, Security and Trust (PST 2017), ACM CCSW 2014, Financial Cryptography 2014, ACNS 2013 and Crypto 2012.

She has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of Waterloo, Canada. Her current research interests are cryptography, information theoretic security, quantum-safe cryptography, network and communication security and privacy, Cloud security, and Distributed Ledger and Smart Contracts.