Indian-origin Vinod Vaikuntanathan is among five Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professors who have been selected to receive the 2023 Simons Investigators Awards.
The Simons Investigator program supports “outstanding theoretical scientists who receive a stable base of research support from the foundation, enabling them to undertake the long-term study of fundamental questions.”
At MIT, Vaikuntanathan is a professor of computer science and also a principal investigator at the institute’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
Vaikuntanathan is known for his work on fully homomorphic encryption, a powerful cryptographic primitive that enables complex computations on encrypted data, as well as lattice-based cryptography, which lays down a new mathematical foundation for cryptography in the post-quantum world.
As the co-inventor of modern fully homomorphic encryption systems and many other lattice-based (and post-quantum secure) cryptographic primitives, Vaikuntanathan’s work has been recognized with a George M. Sprowls PhD thesis award, an IBM Josef Raviv Fellowship, a Sloan Faculty Fellowship, a Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, a Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Award, Test of Time awards from IEEE FOCS and CRYPTO conferences, and a Gödel prize.
Vaikuntanathan has earned his SM and PhD degrees from MIT, and a BTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Recently, he has been interested in the interactions of cryptography with quantum computing, as well as with statistics and machine learning.
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