Short answers, pulled from the story.
Cynthia Dwork is best known for co-inventing differential privacy and proof-of-work. Differential privacy is a mathematical framework that allows data analysis while protecting individual privacy. Proof-of-work, originally proposed to combat email spam, became a key technology underlying hashcash and bitcoin.
Cynthia Dwork works at Harvard University, where she holds three appointments: Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science, Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Affiliated Professor at Harvard Law School and Harvard's Department of Statistics.
Dwork and her co-authors received the IACR 2016 TCC Test-of-Time Award and the 2017 Gödel Prize for the seminal paper introducing differential privacy. She is also a co-winner of the 2021 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for fundamental contributions to differential privacy's development.
Cynthia Dwork received the National Medal of Science in 2025. She was also awarded the Japan Prize in the field of Electronics and Communication in 2026.
The first lattice-based cryptosystem was created by Cynthia Dwork and Miklós Ajtai in 1997. It was the first public-key cryptosystem to achieve worst-case/average-case equivalence, meaning breaking a random instance is as hard as solving the hardest possible instance of the underlying mathematical problem.
Cynthia Dwork is the daughter of mathematician Bernard Dwork and the sister of historian Debórah Dwork. She earned her B.S.E. from Princeton University in 1979, graduating Cum Laude, and received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1983 under the supervision of John Hopcroft.