Yael Tauman Kalai is a world-renowned cryptographer, not only delivering fundamental insights into the mathematical foundations of cryptography, but also practically useful contributions in areas such as blockchain and cryptocurrencies. These advances were recognised by the Association for Computing Machinery in 2022 when Tauman Kalai received the 2022 ACM Prize in Computing “for breakthroughs on verifiable delegation of computation and fundamental contributions to cryptography”.
An undergraduate mathematics degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and master’s in computer science and applied mathematics from The Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, laid the foundations for Tauman Kalai’s rapid ascent to the upper echelons of cryptographic research. Even before her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, completed in 2006, Tauman Kalai was making inroads into improving the efficiency and security of computation and communication.
For example, in 2001 her master’s project introduced a new type of digital signature she co-invented called a ring signature that can be performed by any member of a set of users that each have cryptographic keys to anonymously leak a secret. Ring signatures have since gone on to play a key role in numerous cryptocurrency systems. Not long after, her research on the widely-adopted Fiat–Shamir transform – critical, for example, in the most prevalent digital signature scheme used by all iOS and Android smartphones today – established a better understanding of the paradigm’s security issues.
Extending these studies, Tauman Kalai is particularly known for her work developing cryptographic tools and techniques that succinctly ‘prove’, or certify the correctness of any computation. Instead of requiring devices to make complex and costly calculations to generate these proofs, succinct non-interactive arguments (SNARGs) effectively generate short certificates verifying a given computation.
This research has led to the development of efficient and secure methods for verifying the integrity of computations performed in cloud computing and in blockchain technologies. For example, SNARGs enable users to prove the validity of their transactions on the blockchain, without revealing any sensitive information.
Having completed a stint as Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Tauman Kalai is currently (2025) Professor at MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. In this role, alongside passionately advocating for diversity in computer science, she is focused on ensuring our devices are secure for the future, if and when quantum computers become available that are capable of breaking our best cryptographic schemes underlying secure communication.
Tauman Kalai is married to Adam Tauman Kalai, a Research Scientist at OpenAI working on AI safety and ethics. By an amazing coincidence, her father and father-in-law – Professors Yair Tauman and Ehud Kalai – are both renowned Israeli-American game theorists.
Yael Tauman Kalai will hold the Heidelberg Lecture at the 8th Lindau Nobel Meeting in Economic Sciences. Every year, the programmes of both the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings and the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) reflect the close partnership of these two gatherings. At the HLF there is traditionally a Lindau Lecture, while the Heidelberg Lecture is a fixed part of every Lindau Meeting.