Photo of Cynthia Dwork

Cynthia Dwork

  • National Medal of Science
  • Computer Science

For visionary contributions to the field of computer science and secure public-key cryptography. Cynthia Dwork’s innovative research, analysis, and discoveries on differential privacy, fairness in algorithms, and statistical validity in adaptive data analysis help guide cutting-edge technologies across modern society and play a critical role in advancing the global public good.

Cynthia Dwork, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, and Affiliated Faculty at Harvard Law School and Department of Statistics, is renowned for placing privacypreserving data analysis on a mathematically rigorous foundation. A cornerstone of this work is Differential Privacy, a strong privacy guarantee permitting sophisticated data analysis. Differential Privacy is widely deployed in industry and formed the backbone of the Disclosure Avoidance System for the 2020 US Decennial Census.

Dwork joined Harvard after more than thirty years in industrial research at IBM and Microsoft. Some of her earliest work, recognized by the 2007 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing, established the pillars on which every fault-tolerant distributed system has been built for decades. Her subsequent innovations modernized cryptography to handle the ungoverned interactions of the internet through the development of non-malleable cryptography; provided a proof-of-concept for the post-quantum era with the first lattice-based public-key cryptosystem, which also was the first to enjoy worst-case/average-case equivalence; fought email spam and formed the basis of crypto-currencies through proofs of work; and gave the first general approach to ensuring statistical validity in exploratory data analysis, via a connection to differential privacy. In 2012 she launched the theoretical investigation of algorithmic fairness, a topic experiencing explosive growth and the driving force behind the multidisciplinary Hire Aspirations Institute devoted to fairness in hiring platforms.

Dwork is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the ACM. Her awards include the Gödel Prize, the ACM-IEEE Knuth Prize, the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, the RSA Mathematics Award, and the IEEE Hamming Medal.

Arati Prabhakar, Ph.D., Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), awards Cynthia Dwork the National Medal of Science during an awards ceremony at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC, January 3, 2025. Photo by Ryan K. Morris