Shafi Goldwasser

Shafi Goldwasser (Hebrew: שפרירה גולדווסר; born 1959) is an American-Israeli computer scientist renowned for her foundational contributions to modern cryptography, computational complexity theory, and related fields such as probabilistic algorithms and computational number theory. She holds the position of RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she has been a faculty member since 1983, the C. Lester Hogan Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and is also a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, a role she has held since 1993. Goldwasser's work has revolutionized the theoretical underpinnings of secure communication and computation, establishing key concepts like provable security that underpin contemporary cryptographic systems. A Turing Award-winning cryptographer, her recent research focuses on safe AI and privacy-preserving machine learning.

Goldwasser earned her B.S. in mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979, followed by an M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981 and 1984, respectively, under the supervision of Manuel Blum. Early in her career, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT in 1983 and advanced rapidly to full professorship there in 1992, later becoming the RSA Professor in 1997 to honor her impact on public-key cryptography. From 2018 to 2024, she served as director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley, fostering interdisciplinary research in theoretical computer science during her tenure.

Goldwasser spent her early childhood in Sea Gate, a beach community near New York City, before moving to Tel Aviv, Israel, at the age of six, where she attended the A.D. Gordon School starting in first grade. Raised in a Jewish-Israeli household that blended American and Israeli cultural influences, she experienced a formative environment emphasizing pragmatism and intellectual curiosity.

Shafi Goldwasser was born Shafrira Goldwasser in 1959 in New York City to Israeli parents of Jewish heritage, granting her dual American-Israeli citizenship from birth. Her father, originally from Poland, survived World War II by escaping to Siberia before settling in Israel, while her mother was born and raised in the agricultural community of Kfar Vitkin, which her maternal family helped found in the 1930s. The family returned to Tel Aviv when Goldwasser was six years old, where she spent her formative years immersed in Israeli culture.

Goldwasser's Jewish heritage played a role in shaping her intellectual pursuits, particularly through her childhood fascination with biblical stories, which fostered a narrative lens that later influenced her research style in theoretical computer science.