After graduating in electromechanical engineering Joan Daemen was awarded his PhD in 1995 from KU Leuven. After his contract ended at COSIC, he privately continued his crypto research and contacted Vincent Rijmen to continue their collaboration that would lead to the Rijndael block cipher, and this was selected by NIST as the new Advanced Encryption Standard in 2000. After over 20 years of security industry experience, including work as a security architect and cryptographer for STMicroelectronics, he is now a professor in the Digital Security Group at Radboud University Nijmegen. He codesigned the Keccak cryptographic hash which was selected as the SHA-3 hash standard by NIST in 2012 and is one of the founders of the permutation-based cryptography movement. In 2017 he won the Levchin Prize for Real World Cryptography "for the development of AES and SHA3". In 2018 he was awarded an ERC advanced grant for research on the foundations of security in symmetric cryptography.

After graduating in electronics engineering, Vincent Rijmen was awarded his PhD in 1997 from KU Leuven. Researching there in the ESAT/COSIC lab he developed the Rijndael algorithm with Joan Daemen, and this was selected by NIST as the new Advanced Encryption Standard in 2000. After work in the security industry, as chief cryptographer at Cryptomathic, he was first a professor at Technische Universität Graz and now in the COSIC Lab in Leuven. He is also an adjunct professor at the Selmer Center (University of Bergen). In 2019, he was named a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research for "co-designing AES, contributions to the design and cryptanalysis of symmetric primitives, and service to the IACR". His research interests include symmetric cryptography and cryptanalysis, side-channel attacks, and mathematical theories for the design of symmetric cryptography primitives.