Russell Impagliazzo received a BA in mathematics from Wesleyan University, and a PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Toronto Computer Science Department from 1989 to 1991, and has been an Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor in the UCSD Department of Computer Science and Engineering since then. From 2007 to 2012, he was also a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His research is in computational complexity, in particular, the theory of randomness within computation, the theory of cryptography, circuit lower bounds, and proof complexity. Impagliazzo has been a NSF Young Investigator, a Sloan Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, and a Guggenheim Fellow, and he is currently a Simons Investigator.

His joint work with Kabanets and Wigderson won a Best Paper Award from the Computational Complexity Conference, and joint work with Kabanets won a Best Paper Award at STOC. His work with Håstad, Levin and Luby won an award for an Outstanding Paper from SIAM.