World-leaders in Cryptography: Amit Sahai

Amit is a professor of computer science at UCLA and is the director of the Center for Encrypted Functionalities. Amit has been cited in his research work over 63,000 times and has an h-index of 91. In 2000, he graduated with a PhD from MIT and then moved to Princeton. In 2004, he then moved to UCLA. Over the years, he has made so many great advancements, including being the co-inventor of many areas of cryptography, including indistinguishability obfuscation schemes, functional encryption, attribute-based encryption, Zero-Knowledge Proofs and Multiparty Computation. In 2018, he was elected as an ACM Fellow for his work for the "contributions to cryptography and to the development of indistinguishability obfuscation", and elected as a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research for "fundamental contributions, including to secure computation, zero knowledge, and functional encryption, and for service to the IACR". In 2023, Amit received the Test of Time Award from the International Association for Cryptologic Research for his 2008 paper "Efficient Non-interactive Proof Systems for Bilinear Groups". Then, in 2022, he received the Michael and Sheila Held Prize from the National Academy of Sciences and which credits outstanding, innovative, creative, and influential research in the areas of combinatorial and discrete optimisation. And, in teaching, in 2016, he won the UCLA Samueli’s Lockheed Martin Excellence in Teaching Award.