Prof. Guy Rothblum

Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics

Prof. Guy Rothblum completed his BA magna cum laude in computer science at the Open University of Israel in 1999. After serving in the technological research and development wing of the Israel Defense Forces, he completed his MSc at the Weizmann Institute in 2005 and his PhD in mathematics and computer sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), under the supervision of Prof. Shafi Goldwasser, in 2009. After serving as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, Prof. Rothblum worked with the Microsoft Research group in Silicon Valley for three years. He joined the Weizmann Institute in October 2016.

Prof. Rothblum’s research seeks new ways to protect the privacy of individuals and their sensitive data in a world of interconnected computer networks that store vast amounts of information in a shared “cloud” of third-party servers. He uses the tools of cryptography and privacy-preserving data analysis, as well as complexity theory, machine learning, statistics, and algorithm design. 

During his PhD studies, Prof. Rothblum spent the summer of 2008 as a research intern at Microsoft Research, New England; and the fall of 2009 as an intern with Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley. He was awarded a Computing Innovation Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2009 and 2010, and a Symantec Graduate Fellowship in 2008. His article, “Securely Obfuscating Re-Encryption”, was selected as one of the top three papers of the Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC) in 2007. He is a recent recipient of the Morris L. Levinson Prize in Mathematics. In addition to his awards, he is a referee for a number of leading journals in cryptography, encryption, and computing; and has served on the program committee for a number of several major conferences in these fields.