Cynthia Dwork is the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, with affiliated appointments at Harvard Law School and the Department of Statistics. Her listed research areas span the theory of computation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computation and society.
Dwork is best known as a co-inventor of differential privacy, a formal definition that bounds how much any single person’s data can affect the output of an analysis. By adding carefully calibrated noise, differential privacy lets organizations publish statistics or train models while giving a provable guarantee that no individual’s record can be reliably singled out. The idea, developed during her years at Microsoft Research, has been adopted by the US Census Bureau and by major technology companies. Her earlier work also helped establish foundations of distributed computing and cryptography.
More recently Dwork has worked on algorithmic fairness, including founding the Hire Aspirations Institute, which studies fairness in hiring systems. Her contributions have been recognized with the 2025 National Medal of Science, cited for “visionary contributions to the field of computer science,” and the 2026 Japan Prize for contributions to an ethical digital society.