2003/BT/CS Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Co-Founder and Chief Cryptographer, Duality Technologies Inc.
Prof. Vinod Vaikuntanathan is an accomplished academician and a noted cryptographer. Along with working as a Full Professor of EECS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is also the Co-Founder and Chief Cryptographer of Duality Technologies Inc., Cambridge, MA, USA.
He is a proud alumnus of IIT Madras, having graduated in 2003 with a B. Tech in Computer Science and a minor in Physics. He completed his S.M in Computer Science in 2005, and obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009. He has played a crucial role in the development of new cryptographic tools for creating safe communication and computation systems.
He has played a leading role in the invention of advanced fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) systems, and in the development of a foundation of lattice-based cryptography which provides us with a leading way to achieve post-quantum security. His theoretical contributions have significantly impacted the practice of cryptography as well. Recently, he has also been interested in the interactions of cryptography with quantum computing, as well as with statistics and machine learning.
His research has been published in some of the most prestigious theoretical computer science and security venues, including conferences such as the Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), the Symposium on Theory of Computation (STOC), CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT, and in journals such as the Journal of the ACM (JACM) and the SIAM Journal of Computing.
His immense passion and dedication towards the subject has made him the recipient of many research awards including the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2013, the 2014 NSF CAREER Award, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship in 2014, the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2018 and the Simons Investigator Award in 2023. He is a recipient of the Gödel Prize in 2022 for his work on fully homomorphic encryption as well as test of time awards from the FOCS and CRYPTO conferences.
He is also a dedicated teacher and mentor, and is the recipient of the 2018 Harold E. Edgerton award and the 2024 MacVicar Faculty Fellowship for exemplary and sustained contributions to the teaching and education of undergraduates at MIT.
For his achievements and contributions towards the field of Computer Science, the Indian Institute of Technology and its alumni are proud to confer Prof. Vinod Vaikuntanathan with the Distinguished Alumni Award for the year 2024.
