The Hebrew University of Jerusalem conferred a prestigious honorary doctorate degree on Turing Award Winner and UC Berkeley and MIT Professor Shafrira (Shafi) Goldwasser during the 89th Board of Governors Meeting on October 19 in Jerusalem, Israel.

Prof. Goldwasser has made fundamental contributions to cryptography, computational complexity, computational number theory, and probabilistic algorithms. Her career includes many landmark papers that have initiated entire subfields of computer science. These include creating the theoretical foundations of modern cryptography and the introduction of zero-knowledge interactive proofs and multi-prover proofs (later known as probabilistically checkable proofs), and their
application to showing hardness of approximation and to verifying the correctness of delegated computations. She is currently dedicating her research efforts to building responsible and safe AI.

Goldwasser was the recipient of the 2012 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Turing Award. She was also the recipient of the Gödel Prize in 1993 and another in 2001 for her work on interactive proofs and connections to approximation, and was awarded the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (1996), the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics (1998), the ACM Athena Lecturer Award (2008), the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science (2010), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Emanuel R. Piore Award (2011), the Barnard College Medal of Distinction (2016), and the Suffrage Science Award (2016). She is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ACM, National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences, Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities, London Mathematical Society, and Russian Academy of Sciences.

President of the Hebrew University Prof. Tamir Sheafer conferred the Degree of Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa, "in honor of her esteemed academic career in computer science, revolutionizing the field of theoretical computer science, particularly cryptography, and reshaping our understanding of what constitutes a proof; in tribute to her leadership within the scientific and academic communities, recognized by myriad professional prizes and awards; and with gratitude for years of close friendship with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, fostering research and collaboration with the Rachel and Selim Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering."

“The six months I spent at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1987 for a sabbatical were probably the most transformative months of my life professionally and personally,” Goldwasser says. “I am thrilled and proud to receive this recognition from the Hebrew University!”

Goldwasser received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.S. in Mathematics and Science from Carnegie Mellon.