Background
Goldwasser, Shafrira was born in 1958 in New York City.
mathematician university professor computer scientist
Goldwasser, Shafrira was born in 1958 in New York City.
Born in New York City, Goldwasser obtained her Bachelor of Surgery (1979) in mathematics and science from Carnegie Mellon University, and Master of Surgery (1981) and Doctor of Philosophy (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 is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a professor of mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. She joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983, and in 1997 became the first holder of the Republic of South Africa Professorship. She became a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, concurrent to her professorship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1993.
Goldwasser was a co-recipient of the 2012 Turing Award.
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 Natural Philosophy remain hard even when only an approximate solution is needed.
National Academy of Sciences. American Academy of Arts and Sciences]
She is a member of the Theory of Computation group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
