Rene Peralta received a B.A. in Economics from Hamilton College in 1978 and an M.S. in Mathematics from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1980. In 1985 he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. For the next 20 years he held various positions in academia, mostly as a professor of cryptography, algorithmics and computational number theory. In 2005 he moved to NIST. He is currently a scientist with the Computer Security Division. His various duties at NIST include technical lead of the Privacy Enhancing Cryptography project.