MIT’s Shafi Goldwasser Wins the 2021 L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Award

Shafi Goldwasser, the RSA Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was named 2021 Laureate for North America in the 2021 L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Awards.

Founded in 1998, the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Awards annually honors five eminent women scientists representing every major region of the world. Specifically focusing on excellent research within the physical sciences, mathematics, and computer science, the program, which has honored 117 laureates since its creation. The awards seek to “make visible” the achievements of women in science, heralding their accomplishments and inspiring more women to pursue science as a vocation.

This year’s award celebrates Professor Goldwasser’s groundbreaking work in cryptography, which has enabled secure communication and verification over the internet and collaborative computation on private data. In announcing the award, the organizers said Dr. Goldwasser’s research “has a significant impact on our understanding of large classes of problems for which computers cannot efficiently find approximate solutions.”

In addition to her duties at MIT, Goldwasser is director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, professor in electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, and professor of computer science and applied mathematics at Weizmann Institute in Israel.

Professor Goldwasser joined the faculty at MIT in 1983. She is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Dr. Goldwasser holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.