Joan Feigenbaum
Dept. Chair and Professor, Yale UniversityJoan Feigenbaum is the Grace Murray Hopper Professor of Computer Science at Yale University, where she also holds a courtesy appointment as Professor of Economics. She received a BA in Mathematics from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford. Between finishing her Ph.D. in 1986 and starting at Yale in 2000, she was with AT&T, where she participated broadly in the company’s Information-Sciences research agenda, e.g., by creating a research group in Algorithms and Distributed Data, of which she was the manager in 1998-99.
Professor Feigenbaum’s research interests include security, privacy, anonymity, and accountability; Internet algorithmics; and computational complexity. While at Yale, she has been a principal in several high-profile activities, including the DHS-funded Pri-Fi Project, the DARPA-funded DISSENT project, and the NSF-funded PORTIA project. Her many service contributions to the research community include Program Chair of Crypto ’91, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cryptology (1997-2002), Program Co-Chair of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (2004), Program Chair of the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (2013), Department Chair of the Yale Computer Science Department (July 2014 through June 2017), General Chair of the inaugural ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law (2019), and ACM Vice President (July 2020 through June 2022).
Professor Feigenbaum is an Amazon Scholar, a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the AAAS, a Member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and a Connecticut Technology Council Woman of Innovation. In 1998, she was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians. In May 2020, she won the Test-of-Time Award from the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy for her 1996 paper (with Matt Blaze and Jack Lacy) entitled “Decentralized Trust Management.”