Shafi Goldwasser was honored with the Turing Award, the highest honor in computer science, for her work in revolutionizing the field of cryptography. Raised in Israel, Shafira Goldwasser graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979 with a BS in math and science from before going on to earn an MS in 1981 and PhD in 1984 in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1982 she coauthored a paper with MIT professor Silvio Micali, “Probabilistic Encryption,” widely credited with turning encryption from an art to a science and allowing better data security in the internet age. The pair followed this with another game-changing paper in 1985 on zero-knowledge interactive proofs, which make it possible to prove a statement or concept without revealing any new information. (This system was the basis for security questions allowing internet users to retrieve lost passwords.) For their efforts, the pair was honored with the Turing Award in 2012. Goldwasser began teaching at MIT in 1983 and at the Weizmann Institute in 1993; as of 2015 she still teaches at both institutions.