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Nir Shavit

Nir Shavit is an Israeli computer scientist and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for his work on multiprocessors and software transactional memory.

born 1959Software transactional memoryMultiprocessor programming textbookCo-founding Neural Magic

Born: 18 October 1959
Occupation: computer scientist, engineer, university teacher
Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

Nir Shavit was born in 1959

Nir Shavit was born on October 18, 1959. He studied computer science at the Technion, earning a B.Sc. in 1984 and an M.Sc. in 1986. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1990, under the supervision of Danny Dolev.

He lectured at MIT and worked as a researcher at Sun Labs. In 1992 he began teaching in the Computer Science Department at Tel Aviv University. In 2008 he published the textbook The Art of Multiprocessor Programming with Maurice Herlihy.

Since 2011 he has been a professor at MIT, where he leads the Computational Connectomics Group. His work covers multiprocessors and concurrent data structures. He received the Gödel Prize in 2004 and the Dijkstra Prize in 2012, and became an ACM Fellow in 2013.

With Alexander Matveev he co-founded Neural Magic, a company that ran machine learning models. The company was sold to Red Hat in 2024. He was married to computer scientist Shafi Goldwasser, with whom he has two sons.