Harvard professor of Computer Science,Cynthia Dwork, is among the fourteen recipients of the National Medal of Science presented  by President Joe Biden on January 3, 2025.

Established by Congress in 1959, the medal is awarded for outstanding contributions to science in service to the United States, and is administered by the U.S. National Science Foundation. While there is no cash prize associated with the medal it is recognised as bestowing the nation’s highest honors for exemplary achievement. According to the White House press release:

“Those who earn these awards embody the promise of America by pushing the boundaries of what is possible. These trailblazers have harnessed the power of science and technology to tackle challenging problems and deliver innovative solutions for Americans and for communities around the world.”   

According to Cynthia Dwork's website:

“She uses theoretical computer science to place societal problems on a firm mathematical foundation.”

She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 1979 and her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1983. After a two-year post-doctoral appointment at MIT, she joined the IBM Almaden Research Center and in 2001 moved to Microsoft Research. She took up her current posts of Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Radcliffe Alumnae Professorship at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard in 2017.

Dwork is widely known for the introduction and development of differential privacy, and for her work on non-malleability, lattice-based encryption, concurrent composition, and proofs of work. Her contributions has already been recognized many times. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2008, and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008) and the Association for Computing Machinery (2015)  She was awarded the Dijkstra Prize in 2007 for her work on consensus problems. In 2009 she won the PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies and she was a co-recipient of the 2017 Gödel Prize for a seminal paper that introduced differential privacy and in 2019 she won the IEEE Hamming Medal for her:

“foundational work in privacy, cryptography, and distributed computing, and for leadership in developing differential privacy.” 

As reported in Cynthia Dwork Awarded 2020 Knuth Prize she was awarded the 2020 ACM SIGACT and IEEE TCMF Knuth Prize for two areas of her work - cryptography in a network environment and privacy. More recently she has turned to algorithmic fairness addressing an increasing concern that, as computers and computer algorithms reach ever more deeply into our lives, they should incorporate societal values such as privacy, fairness, and statistical validity.

Being presented the National Medal by President Biden is further recognition of the value of her contributions in so many areas.

More Information

AMS announcement 

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Cynthia Dwork Awarded 2020 Knuth Prize 

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