Salil Vadhan is the Vicky Joseph Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics in the Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the Director of the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society. He received his PhD in Applied Mathematics from MIT in 1999, and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT and the Institute for Advanced Study before joining the Harvard faculty in 2001. He is a recipient of a Simons Investigator Award, a Godel Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Phi Beta Kappa Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

 Vadhan's research area is theoretical computer science, specifically computational complexity, cryptography, and differential privacy. He collaborates with researchers in IQSS as the lead PI on an NSF frontier project “Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data” (http://privacytools.seas.harvard.edu/).

This is a broad, multidisciplinary effort at Harvard to help enable the collection, analysis, and sharing of personal data for research in social science and other fields while providing privacy for the data subjects. Bringing together computer science, social science, statistics, and law, the project seeks to refine definitions and measures of privacy and data utility, and design an array of technological, legal, and policy tools for dealing with sensitive data.