Shafi Goldwasser

Shafi Goldwasser
Born	Shafrira Goldwasser 1958 (age 58–59) New York City, NY, US
Nationality	Israeli American
Fields	Computer science, cryptography
Institutions	Massachusetts Institute of Technology Weizmann Institute of Science
Alma mater	Carnegie Mellon University (BS) University of California, Berkeley (PhD)
Thesis	Probabilistic Encryption: Theory and Applications (1984)
Doctoral advisor	Manuel Blum[1]
Doctoral students	William Aiello Johan Håstad Joseph Kilian Tal Malkin Yishay Mansour Daniele Micciancio Guy Rothblum Amit Sahai Salil Vadhan Vinod Vaikuntanathan[1]
Known for	Blum–Goldwasser cryptosystem Goldwasser–Micali cryptosystem[2]
Notable awards	Grace Murray Hopper Award (1996) Gödel Prize (1993, 2001) IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (2011) ACM Turing Award (2012)[3]
Website people.csail.mit.edu/shafi www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~shafi www.eecs.mit.edu/people/faculty/shafrira-goldwasser

Shafrira Goldwasser (Hebrew: שפרירה גולדווסר‎‎; born 1958) is an American-Israeli computer scientist. She is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, and a professor of mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.^[4][5][6][7]

Biography

Born in New York City, Goldwasser obtained her B.S. (1979) in mathematics and science from Carnegie Mellon University, and M.S. (1981) and PhD (1984) in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Manuel Blum, who is well known for advising some of the most prominent researchers in the field. She joined MIT in 1983, and in 1997 became the first holder of the RSA Professorship. She became a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, concurrent to her professorship at MIT, in 1993. She is a member of the Theory of Computation group at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.^[8] Goldwasser was a co-recipient of the 2012 Turing Award.^[9]

Scientific career

Goldwasser's research areas include computational complexity theory, cryptography and computational number theory. She is the 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 complexity theory includes the classification of approximation problems, showing that some problems in NP remain hard even when only an approximate solution is needed.

Awards

Goldwasser has twice won the Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science: first in 1993 (for "The knowledge complexity of interactive proof systems"),^[10] and again in 2001 (for "Interactive Proofs and the Hardness of Approximating Cliques").^[11] Other awards include the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (1996) for outstanding young computer professional of the year and the RSA Award in Mathematics (1998) for outstanding mathematical contributions to cryptography. In 2001 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 2004 she was elected to the National Academy of Science, and in 2005 to the National Academy of Engineering. She was selected as an IACR Fellow in 2007. Goldwasser received the 2008-2009 Athena Lecturer Award of the Association for Computing Machinery's Committee on Women in Computing.^[12] She is the recipient of The Franklin Institute's 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science.^[13] She received the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award in 2011, and was awarded the 2012 Turing Award along with Silvio Micali for their work in the field of cryptography.^[14]

References