Shafrira Goldwasser (; born 1959) is an Israeli-American computer scientist and winner of the Turing Award in 2012. She is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, a professor of mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, co-founder and chief scientist of Duality Technologies and the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley. Education and early life Born in New York City, Goldwasser obtained her Bachelor of Science degree in 1979 in mathematics and science from Carnegie Mellon University. For her postgraduate study, she did a Master of Science degree in 1981 followed by a PhD (1984) in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley supervised by Manuel Blum. Career and research Goldwasser joined MIT in 1983, and in 1997 became the first holder of the RSA Professorship. She became a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, concurrent to her professorship at MIT, in 1993. She is a member of the theory of computation group at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 2005, Goldwasser was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to cryptography, number theory, and complexity theory, and their applications to privacy and security, and in 2006, Berkeley awarded her its Computer Science Distinguished Alumni Award. Goldwasser was a co-recipient of the 2012 Turing Award for "revolutionizing the science of cryptography". Since November 2016, Goldwasser has been serving as the chief scientist and co-Founder of Duality Technologies, a US-based start-up which offers secure data analytics using advanced cryptographic techniques. She is also a scientific advisor for several technology startups in the security area, including QED-it, specializing in the Zero Knowledge Blockchain, and Algorand, a pure proof-of-stake blockchain. On January 1, 2018, she became the director of Berkeley's Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. Goldwasser's research areas include computational complexity theory, cryptography and computational number theory. She is the co-inventor of probabilistic encryption, which set up and achieved the gold standard for security for data encryption. Goldwasser is a co-inventor of zero-knowledge proofs, which probabilistically and interactively demonstrate the validity of an assertion without conveying any additional knowledge, and are a key tool in the design of cryptographic protocols. Her work in complexity theory includes the classification of approximation problems, showing that some problems in NP remain hard even when only an approximate solution is