Vinod Vaikuntanathan earns 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship

Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Ford Foundation professor of engineering within EECS and CSAIL principal investigator, has been named a Guggenheim Fellow to help “break new ground” in computer science. The award is given out yearly to leading thinkers, innovators, and creators across art, science, and scholarship to tackle current issues.

Vaikuntanathan’s research is centered around securing our information systems. He focuses on the foundations of cryptography and its applications to theoretical computer science at large. His recent work includes analyzing how cryptography interacts with quantum computing, statistics, and machine learning.

He’s known for his work on fully homomorphic encryption, a technique that enables complex computations on encrypted data. The method could help keep sensitive information like financial metrics or personal data secure in the future. To alleviate the computational demands of fully homomorphic encryption, Vaikuntanathan and his colleagues have developed “somewhat homomorphic encryption,” which is a scheme that relies on lightweight cryptographic tools. The method allows users to do a limited number of operations on encrypted data without decrypting it, helping with tasks such as private database lookups and private statistical analysis.

Vaikuntanathan has also made key contributions to lattice-based cryptography, an approach that hides data behind hard geometric problems in high-dimensional spaces, which are hard for both classical and quantum computers to solve. Recently, he has used insights from lattices to resolve open questions in statistics related to the computational complexity of learning Gaussian mixtures, the number partitioning problem, and the symmetric binary perceptron problem.

Vaikuntanathan’s previous awards include the Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Award, the Goedel Prize, the Simons Investigator Award, the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, a Best Paper Award from CRYPTO 2024, and test-of-time awards from IEEE FOCS and CRYPTO conferences. He was also named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 2024.