Shafi Goldwasser

Prof. Goldwasser is the inventor of several revolutionary cryptographic technologies, including probabilistic encryption, multi-party secure protocols and pseudo-random functions. She was awarded the ACM Turing Award in 2012 for "for transformative work that laid the complexity-theoretic foundations for the science of cryptography, and in the process pioneered new methods for efficient verification of mathematical proofs in complexity theory”. Prof. Goldwasser has been a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1983, and in 1997 became the first holder of the RSA Professorship (named after the inventors of the first public- key cryptosystem, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman). Concurrently with her professorship at MIT, she has been a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science since 1993. Prof. Goldwasser was nominated as the director of the Simons Institute for Theory of Computation at Berkeley starting 2018. Prof. Goldwasser holds honorary degrees from Haifa university, Bar Ilan University and Ben Gurion University in Israel. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, the National Academy of Sciences in 2004, the National Academy of Engineering in 2005, Israeli Academy of Science (2015), London Mathematical Society (2015), and the Russian Academy of Science (2016). Among Prof. Goldwasser's awards are the Godel Prizes (1993, 2001), the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (1996), the RSA Award In Mathematics (1998), the ACM Athena Lecturer Award (2009), the Benjamin Franklin Award in Computer and Cognitive Science (2010), IEEE Emanuel Piore Award (2011), Barnard College Medal of Distinction (2016), and Suffrage Science Award, Imperial College London(2016).