Eli Ben-Sasson

Eli Ben-Sasson was born in 1970 in Kiryat Moshe

Ben-Sasson was born in 1970 and grew up in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood of Jerusalem, in a religious Zionist family. He served in Unit 8200 of the IDF.

In 1993 he began undergraduate studies in computer science and biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He earned his PhD there in 2001 under Avi Wigderson, and later did postdoctoral work at Harvard and MIT.

He joined the computer science faculty at the Technion in 2005 and became a full professor in 2015. His research covered theoretical computer science and complexity theory, including short proofs that can be checked efficiently. In 2013 he spoke at a Bitcoin conference about using zero-knowledge proofs to help Bitcoin scale.

In 2014 he took part in designing Zerocash, a private cryptocurrency based on zero-knowledge proofs, and later became a founding scientist of Zcash. In 2018 he and other researchers invented the STARK and FRI protocols, and he co-founded StarkWare Industries. The Technion sued him in 2019 over the company's intellectual property, and the two sides settled.

He is married to Dr. Ayelet Ben-Sasson, a senior lecturer at the University of Haifa, and they have 5 children.