Prof. Shafi Goldwasser

A professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and a professor of Mathematical Sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, Prof. Shafi Goldwasser continues to make some fundamental contributions in the fields of cryptography, computational complexity, computational number theory and probabilistic algorithms. Her illustrious career includes many landmark papers, which span topics like creating the theoretical foundations of modern cryptography, the introduction of zero-knowledge interactive proofs, the introduction of multi-prover proofs , discovering the connection between probabilistically checkable proofs and the intractability of approximation problems, showing how to use the theory of elliptic curves to distinguish primes from composites, and launching combinatorial property testing.

Born in 1959 in New York City, she went on to earn her B.S. (1979) in Mathematics and Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and M.S. (1981) and Ph.D. (1984) in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

A two time recipient of the Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science (1993 and 2001), she has gone on to receive several accolades for her outstanding contributions in Computing and Mathematics. Some of them include: ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (1996), RSA Award in Mathematics (1998), the ACM Athena award for women in computer science (2008), the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science (2010), the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (2011), ACM Turing Award (2012), the Barnard College Medal of Distinction (2016), and the Suffrage Science Award (2016). She is a member of the AAAS, ACM, NAE, NAS, Israeli Academy of Science, London Mathematical Society, and Russian Academy of Science.