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Amit Sahai is a professor of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and the director of the Center for Encrypted Functionalities, a National Science Foundation Frontiers Center. He is a Simons Investigator (2021), Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (2021), Fellow of the ACM (2018), Fellow of the IACR (2019), and the Symantec Endowed Chair in Computer Science.

Sahai’s research interests are in the foundations of computer security and cryptography, in particular, hiding secrets in software — secure program obfuscation, cryptographic proofs and secure multiparty computation. He is the co-inventor of attribute-based encryption, functional encryption and indistinguishability obfuscation.

Prior to joining UCLA in 2004, Sahai was on the faculty at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 2000, and has published more than 150 original technical research papers at venues such as the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), CRYPTO, and the Journal of the ACM. He serves as an editor of J. Cryptology (Springer-Nature) and is an advisor to the nonprofit Prison Mathematics Project.

He is a frequent speaker at various institutions, including MIT, Stanford, Berkeley and the 2004 Distinguished Cryptographer Lecture Series at NTT Labs in Japan.

Professor Sahai is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow in 2002, an Okawa Research Grant Award in 2007, a Xerox Foundation Faculty Award in 2010, a Google Faculty Research Award in 2010, a 2012 Pazy Memorial Award, a 2016 ACM CCS Test of Time Award, a 2019 AWS Machine Learning Research Award, a 2020 IACR Test of Time Award (Eurocrypt) and a STOC 2021 Best Paper Award.

For his teaching, Sahai was given the 2016 Lockheed Martin Excellence in Teaching Award from UCLA Samueli. His research has been covered by many news outlets including Forbes, BBC, Quanta Magazine, Wired, and IEEE Spectrum.