Shafrira "Shafi" Goldwasser

Born: 1958 or 1959 (depending on source used)

Country of Birth: USA

Nationality: Israeli-American

Ethnicity: White

Carnegie-Mellon University BS Applied mathematics 1979; UC Berkeley MS 1981 & PhD 1984 both in Computer Science

""As a theoretical computer scientist, I am motivated by real world challenges on the one hand and the beauty of mathematics and abstraction on the other. I have worked at various times in cryptography, complexity theory, computational number theory, probabilistic algorithms, and distributed computation. Some examples of research themes I have tackled are: how to incorporate randomness into the model and the design of efficiently verifiable mathematical proofs and use them to achieve secure communication protocols and a classification of the complexity of approximation problems; how to meaningfully relax the classical requirements made of a combinatorial testing algorithm to allow for error and gain feasibility in return. Currently I am interested in understanding the minimal requirements on the limits of efficient of computation, that will allow for secure communication." (nasonline.org); " I think if you’re very lucky, there is someone early on – and that could be high school, it could be maybe college, but better in high school – that awakens something in you, that somehow a spark, an interest, so that maybe later you’re not going to do exactly that but you know there’s something about studying and about pursuing knowledge that is exciting. I think it’s fundamental, and I don’t think that it has to be more than one." (amturing.acm.org); "

— Shafrira "Shafi" Goldwasser

Field of Study: Computer Science; Cryptography

Institution/Corporation: MIT; Weitzmann Institute; Simons Institute Berkeley

Degrees & Memberships: Honorary Degrees: Carnegie-Mellon University (2018); University of Oxford (2019); Ben Gurion University; Bar Ilan University; Haifa University; University of Waterloo; Member: National Academy of Sciences (2004); ACM Fellow (2017); AAAS Fellow (2001); National Academy of Engineering (2005); Theory of Computation Group At MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; IACR Fellow (2007); Israeli Academy of Science; London Mathematical Society; Russian Academy of Science;

Awards: r2012 Turing Award (with Silvio Micali); 1996 Grace Murray Hopper Award; 1993 & 2001 Godel Prize; 2011 Emmanuel R. Piore Award, IEEE; 2018 BBVA Award; 1998 RSA Mathematics Award; 2021 L'Oreal UNESCO Women in Science Award; 2016 Suffrage Science Award; 2006 Computer Science Distinguished Alumni Award, Berkeley; 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal; 2018 Frontier of Knowledge Award (with Silvio Micali, Ron Rivest, & Adi Shamir); 2021 FOCS Test of Time Award; 2012 Simons Foundation Investigator Award; 2007 EECS Distinguished Alumni Award; 1999 Morris L. Levinson Prize in Mathematics; 2008 Athena Award for women in Computer Science, ACM; 2016 Barnard College Medal of distinction; 2023 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing

Achievements: main achievement was the Blum-Goldwasser & Goldwasser-Micali cryptosystems; 2016 co-founder and chief scientist of Duality Technologies; research areas include computational complexity theory, cryptography and computational number theory; co-inventor of probabilistic encryption, which set up and achieved the gold standard for security for data encryption; co-inventor of zero-knowledge proofs, which probabilistically and interactively demonstrate the validity of an assertion without conveying any additional knowledge, and are a key tool in the design of cryptographic protocols; her work in number theory includes the invention with Joe Kilian of primality proving using elliptic curves; is a lead on Project CETI, an interdisciplinary initiative for translating the communication of sperm whales; inventor of several revolutionary cryptographic technologies including probabilistic encryption, multi-party secure protocols, and pseudo-random function;