Shafrira Goldwasser

Shafrira Goldwasser was born in 1958 in New York City

Goldwasser was born in New York City. Her father was an envoy of the Clalit health fund to the United States, and the family returned to Israel. She grew up in Tel Aviv and attended Ironi Dalet high school.

She earned a bachelor's degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979. She then completed graduate degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Manuel Blum. At Berkeley she worked on cryptography and, with Silvio Micali, introduced probabilistic encryption.

Goldwasser joined MIT in 1983 and became the first holder of its RSA Professorship in 1997. Since 1993 she has also been a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. With Micali and Charles Rackoff she introduced zero-knowledge proofs, and she also worked on complexity theory and number theory.

She co-founded Duality Technologies, which works on data privacy, and served as its chief scientist. From 2018 to 2024 she directed the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. In 2026 she co-founded the Institute for Responsible Superintelligence, a nonprofit for AI safety research.

She is married to Nir Shavit, a computer science professor at Tel Aviv University, and they have two children.