Abhi Shelat

Research interests

• Cryptography
• Applied security

Education

• PhD in Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• MS in Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• BA in Computer Science, Harvard University

Biography

Abhi Shelat is a professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Boston.

Shelat's research interests lie in cryptography and applied security. He works on secure computation protocols, which allow mutually distrusting parties, each with private inputs, to jointly compute a function while ensuring maximal privacy and correctness.

He grew up in Austin, Texas, where his father worked after earning his MBA from Northeastern in 1975. He earned his bachelor's from Harvard University in 1997 before moving to San Francisco to work at a startup. He received his PhD in cryptography from MIT in 2005 and joined the Zurich IBM Research Lab shortly after. Then he joined the computer science department at the University of Virginia in 2007, where he was tenured and promoted to associate professor in 2013.

Shelat has received the NSF CAREER award, Microsoft Faculty Fellowship Award, the FEST fellowship award, an Amazon Research award, an SAIC research award, a Jacobs Future of Money Workshop research prize, the Google Faculty Research Award, and an ACM UVA-Chapter Professor of the Year award. He is also the co-founder of a software company, Arqspin, in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Shelat has three energetic children with his partner,  acclaimed architectural historian and fellow Northeastern professor Cammy Brothers.

Labs and groups

• Algorithms and Theory

Recent publications