Murat Kantarcioglu is a professor of Computer Science and the director of the UTD Data Security and Privacy Lab at The University of Texas at Dallas. He holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Middle East Technical University, and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Purdue University. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and a Purdue CERIAS Diamond Award for academic excellence. Currently, he is also a visiting scholar at Harvard's Data Privacy Lab.

Kantarcioglu's research focuses on creating technologies that can efficiently extract useful information from any data without sacrificing privacy or security. His research has been supported by awards from NSF, AFOSR, ONR, NSA, and NIH. He has published over 165 peer-reviewed papers. His work has been covered by media outlets such as the Boston Globe and ABC News, among others, and he has received three best paper awards.

He is an IEEE senior member and ACM distinguished scientist.