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On July 1, the Department welcomed to our faculty Leighton Family Professor of Mathematics Shafi Goldwasser, Professor Henry Cohn ‘95, and Assistant Professor Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan ’16, MNG ’17, PhD ’23.

Shafi is an Israeli-American computer scientist specializing in cryptography, number theory, and complexity theory. She received a BS in applied mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979, and her MS and PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley in 1984, with advisor Manuel Blum. She joined MIT in 1983 as a member of CSAIL’s Theory of Computation group, and in 1997 became the first holder of the RSA Professorship. She also joined the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1993 where she is now an emeritus professor. She joined UC Berkeley in 2013, where she served as the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing until 2024, and is currently a co-director of the Resilience research pod. In 2016, she cofounded Duality Technologies, which offers secure data analytics using advanced cryptographic techniques. She is also a scientific advisor for several technology startups in the security areas. Among her recognitions is the 2012 Turing Award for "revolutionizing the science of cryptography."

Henry is a 1995 MIT math alum who received his PhD from Harvard in 2000 with advisor Noam Elkies. He joined the theory group at Microsoft Research as a postdoc before transitioning to a long-term position in the group, later managed the cryptography group, and was a senior principal researcher and founding member of Microsoft Research New England. He joined MIT Math as adjunct professor in 2010. Cohn’s research is in discrete mathematics, with a particular interest in the intersection of pure and applied mathematics: pure mathematics inspired by applications, and opportunities to apply mathematics in unexpected ways. Cohn received the 2018 Levi L. Conant Prize for his article “A Conceptual Breakthrough in Sphere Packing," Notices of the AMS, February 2017.

Adit received his SB in Math and EECS, and completed his M.Eng and his PhD with EECS, as advised by Caroline Uhler. He previously was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the George F. Carrier Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard. His research focuses on advancing theoretical foundations of machine learning and developing new methods for tackling biomedical problems. He is also joining the Broad Institute as an associate member, where he is working to assemble a comprehensive catalog of cellular programs and advance our understanding of cellular biology and identify mechanisms of disease. He also goes by the name Adit Radha.

Welcome, Shafi, Henry, and Adit!

Alan Edelman received the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Community on Parallel Processing (TCPP) Award for Excellence in Parallel and Distributed Computing Education, at the International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing (IPDPS), which was held in Milan this month.

He was recognized “for innovative programming language design for HPC (high-performance computing) with Julia used in influential courses impacting academia and industry.”

This award recognizes an individual (or a group of individuals) in the broader community who have made major professional service contributions to the parallel, distributed, and high-performance computing community.

The IEEE Technical Community on Parallel Processing (TCPP) is a technical community within the IEEE Computer Society, acting as an international forum to promote parallel processing research and education. The community solicits nominations for an award on Excellence in Parallel and Distributed Computing Education.

Congratulations, Alan!

The Hertz Foundation announced that it has awarded fellowships to four students with MIT Math ties:

Matthew Caren ’25 studied math, electrical engineering and computer science, and music at MIT. He researches computational models of how people use their voices to communicate sound at CSAIL, and interpretable real-time machine listening systems at the MIT Music Technology Lab.

Arav Karighattam is a 2024 Harvard alum who is coming to MIT to pursue a doctorate in mathematics. Karighattam is fascinated by algebraic number theory and arithmetic geometry and seeks to understand the mysteries underlying the structure of solutions to Diophantine equations.

Benjamin Lou ’25 received his MIT SB in mathematics and physics, and will pursue his doctorate at MIT to to work on unifying quantum mechanics and gravity, with an eye toward uncovering experimentally testable predictions. One of his research projects applies symplectic techniques to understand the nature of precision measurements using quantum states of light.

Albert Qin ‘24 majored in mathematics and physics at MIT, and is also interested in biology, researching single-molecule approaches to study transcription factor diffusion in living cells and studying the cell circuits that control animal development. Qin is currently pursuing a PhD at Princeton University, addressing questions about the behavior of neural networks.

They are among eight total recipients at MIT, and a total of 19 selected from across the United States. The prestigious award provides each recipient with five years of doctoral-level research funding (up to a total of $250,000).

Read more at MIT News.

The 2025 Charles and Holly Housman Award for Excellence in Teaching was presented to three MIT Math community members for their skills and dedication in undergraduate teaching.

Graduate student Keita Allen was recognized for his “true passion for education” and for helping other students, including as a UROP mentor.

Housman awards for instructors were given to Jonathan Bloom, for his ability to teach complex math concepts in a dynamic and engaging way, and to Miguel Moreira, for his supportive teaching style, including as a UROP mentor.

Congratulations, Jonathan, Keita, and Miguel!