Alumna Shafi Goldwasser Receives Honorary Degree at Commencement
Turing Award winner and Mathematical Sciences alumna Shafi Goldwasser received an honorary doctor of science and technology at Carnegie Mellon̓s 121st Commencement on May 20. Goldwasser earned her bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979.
Goldwasser joined Nobel Laureate Ada Yonath, philanthropist and investment icon David Tepper and award-winning actor Ted Danson in receiving honorary degrees.
“It is a CMU tradition to award honorary degrees to exemplary leaders, who serve as role models for our graduates and the entire Carnegie Mellon community,” said CMU President Farnam Jahanian. “This year’s esteemed honorees embody this tradition, having received preeminent levels of distinction in their fields and exhibited a record of extraordinary contributions to society.”
Goldwasser is among the world’s elite computer scientists. In 2012, she received the Association for Computing Machinery’s Turing Award, the highest honor in computer science given to an individual for their contributions “of lasting and major technical importance to the computing field.”
Her pioneering contributions include the introduction of probabilistic encryption, interactive zero knowledge protocols, elliptic curve primality testings, hardness of approximation proofs for combinatorial problems and combinatorial property testing. She is also a two-time winner of the Gödel Prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science.
Early in 2018, Goldwasser took over as the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley. The institute is the world’s leading venue for collaborative research in theoretical computer science and brings together leading researchers and the next generation of young scholars to explore deep unsolved problems about the nature and limits of computation. She had previously been the RSA Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.