Kalai named 2022 IACR Fellow

YTK

MIT EECS Adjunct Associate Professor and CSAIL member Yael Tauman Kalai has been named a 2022 IACR fellow for her foundational contributions in delegated computation and leakage-resilient cryptography, and service to the cryptographic community. The IACR Fellows Program recognizes outstanding IACR members for technical and professional contributions to the field of cryptology. 

Kalai has done remarkable work in the disciplines of cryptography, theory of computation, and privacy and security. While researching advanced solutions for secure computation, she co-invented ring signatures, the basis for many systems like Cryptonote and Monero cryptocurrency. During her PhD at MIT, while advised by Shafi Goldwasser, she discovered an insecurity in the Fiat–Shamir heuristic. 

“Yael has made numerous wonderful contributions to cryptography, on topics from ring signatures, to delegation of computation, to COVID exposure notification and beyond. The depth and breadth of her research is incredible,” says MIT professor Ron Rivest. 

She is currently a Principal Research Scientist at Microsoft Research New England and was previously an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech and a postdoc at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and Microsoft Research in Redmond. 

Kalai received her B.Sc. from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her M.Sc. degree from the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her M.Sc. and Ph.D. thesis were recognized with the Outstanding Master’s Thesis Prize in 2001 and the George M. Sprowls Ph.D. Thesis Award in 2006, respectively.