Cynthia Dwork (right) receives the National Medal of Science from the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Arati Prabhakar, Ph.D. (Credit: Ryan K. Morris and the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation.)

In early January, President Biden announced the newest recipients of the National Medal of Science. This award is presented to individuals in science and engineering who have made significant contributions to the sciences, including such fields as chemistry, mathematics, physics, biology, behavioral and social sciences, and engineering. The medal is administered by the National Science Foundation and was established by Congress in 1959. This award is the highest scientific honor offered in the United States and is bestowed by the President.

Among the many esteemed recipients of the National Medal of Science was previous CCC Council member and current Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard University John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Cynthia Dwork.

Dwork was recognized for her pioneering work in differential privacy that she conducted with colleagues in the early 2000s. Dwork, along with co-authors, formally introduced the concept of differential privacy in their 2006 paper, Calibrating Noise to Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis, which has now been cited almost 10,000 times. This paper introduced the concept of adding noise proportional to query sensitivity as a way to protect individual privacy while enabling statistical analysis. Later that year, Dwork also released Differential Privacy which officially coined the term, and proved that using this framework can ensure that the presence or absence of any given individual in a dataset would not significantly affect the output of a statistical query.

Differential privacy is now the gold standard for privacy-preserving data analysis, and is employed today by major US companies as well as by the government and researchers working with private sensitive data. Companies such as Google and Apple use differential privacy in their software and devices to collect data without compromising the privacy of their users. Researchers studying smart cities, financial transactions, and healthcare data, as well as just about any field of research that involves analyzing sensitive data employ differential privacy frameworks.

Dwork served as a member of the CCC Council from 2015 – 2018. During her time on the council she Co-authored two CCC-led white papers on the topic of privacy (Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis for the Federal Statistics Agencies and Privacy in Information-Rich Intelligent Infrastructure) as well as participated in a CCC workshop on Visions in Theoretical Computer Science and the 2016 CCC Computing Research Symposium.

Please join us in congratulating Cynthia on this incredible accomplishment!