Kristin Estella Lauter is an American mathematician and cryptographer whose research areas are number theory, algebraic geometry, cryptography, coding theory, and machine learning. She is particularly known for her work on Private AI and Homomorphic Encryption, for standardizing and deploying Elliptic Curve Cryptography, and for introducing Supersingular Isogeny Graphs as a foundational hard problem for Post Quantum Cryptography. She is currently the Director of Research Science for Meta AI Research (FAIR) North America, directing FAIR Labs in Seattle, Menlo Park, Pittsburgh, New York, and Montreal. She is also an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington. She served as President of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) from 2015 –2017, and as the Polya Lecturer for the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) for 2018-2020.

Lauter received her BA, MS, and Ph.D degrees in mathematics from the University of Chicago, in 1990, 1991, and 1996, respectively. She was a T.H. Hildebrandt Research Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan (1996-1999), a Visiting Scholar at Max Planck Institut fur Mathematik in Bonn, Germany (1997), and a Visiting Researcher at Institut de Mathematiques Luminy in France (1999). From 1999-2021, she was a researcher at Microsoft Research, leading the Cryptography and Privacy research group for as Partner Research Manager from 2008—2021.

She is a co-founder of the Women in Numbers (WIN) network, a research collaboration community for women in number theory, and she was the lead PI for the AWM NSF Advance Grant (2015-2020) to create and sustain research networks for women in all areas of mathematics. She serves on the National Academies Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS), and on the Scientific Board for the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, UK. She has served on the Advisory Board of the Banff International Research Station, the Council of the American Mathematical Society (2014-2017), and the Executive Committee of the Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences (CBMS).

In 2008 Lauter and her coauthors were awarded the Selfridge Prize in Computational Number Theory. She was elected to the 2015 Class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) "for contributions to arithmetic geometry and cryptography as well as service to the community." She was an Inaugural Fellow of the AWM (2017). In 2020, Lauter was elected as a Fellow of both the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 2021, she was elected as an Honorary member of the Real Sociedad Matemática Española (RSME).