Five MIT professors have been selected to receive the 2023 Simons Investigators awards from the Simons Foundation, including two members of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL): Virginia Vassilevska Williams and Vinod Vaikuntanathan, who are both professors in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and principal investigators in CSAIL. Aram Harrow and Leonid Mirny are professors in the Department of Physics, and Davesh Maulik is a professor in the Department of Mathematics.
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.”
Vinod Vaikuntanathan is a professor of computer science at MIT. 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 earned his SM and PhD degrees from MIT, and a BTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
Virginia Vassilevska Williams is a professor of computer science at MIT EECS. Williams’s research focuses on algorithm design and analysis of fundamental problems involving graphs, matrices and more, seeking to determine the precise (asymptotic) time complexity of these problems. She has designed the fastest algorithm for matrix multiplication and is widely regarded as the leading expert on fine-grained complexity. Among her many awards, she has received an NSF CAREER award; a Sloan Research Fellowship; a Google Faculty Research Award, a Thornton Family Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship (FRIF), and was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018. Williams earned her MS and PhD degrees at Carnegie Mellon University, and her BS degree at Caltech.
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