Vinod Vaikuntanathan
Vinod Vaikuntanathan builds cryptographic schemes that compute on data while it stays encrypted. He earned a BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2003 and SM and PhD degrees from MIT in 2005 and 2009, then worked at IBM and Microsoft, taught at the University of Toronto, and joined the MIT faculty in 2013. With Zvika Brakerski and Craig Gentry, he constructed efficient fully homomorphic encryption from the learning-with-errors problem, and those papers received the 2022 Gödel Prize. He co-founded Duality in 2016 so organizations could compute on encrypted data. As of October 2026, he is the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering at MIT and a CSAIL principal investigator; in 2026 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow.
Timeline
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2003–2009
Degrees from Madras and MIT
He earns a BTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2003, and SM and PhD degrees from MIT in 2005 and 2009.
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2011–2012
Fully homomorphic encryption
With Zvika Brakerski, he publishes Efficient Fully Homomorphic Encryption from (Standard) LWE at FOCS in 2011. With Brakerski and Craig Gentry, he publishes a leveled fully homomorphic encryption scheme without bootstrapping at ITCS in 2012. The schemes compute on encrypted data, and their security rests on the learning-with-errors problem.
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2013
Joining the MIT faculty
Shafi Goldwasser supervises his graduate studies at MIT. He works as a researcher at IBM and at Microsoft, teaches at the University of Toronto, and joins the MIT faculty in 2013.
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2016
Co-founding Duality
In 2016 he co-founds Duality with Shafi Goldwasser and Kurt Rohloff. Homomorphic encryption at the company lets organizations compute on encrypted data.
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2022
A Gödel Prize
The 2022 Gödel Prize goes to his papers with Zvika Brakerski and Craig Gentry on efficient fully homomorphic encryption.
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2023–2024
Simons and MacVicar honors
In 2023 he receives the Simons Investigator Award. In 2024 he is named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow and receives a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras.
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2026
A Guggenheim Fellowship
In 2026 he is named a Guggenheim Fellow. He uses insights from lattices to resolve open questions on the complexity of learning Gaussian mixtures, and he studies cryptography with quantum computing, statistics, and machine learning.
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As of October 2026
Ford professor at MIT
He is the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering in the EECS department at MIT and a principal investigator at MIT CSAIL.
Sources and credits
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- Vinod Vaikuntanathan — Research & Teaching
- Office of Alumni & Corporate Relations
- The 2022 Gödel Prize
- The 2022 Gödel Prize
- Vinod Vaikuntanathan - Wikipedia
- Fortifying the future of cryptography | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Duality Technologies raises $30 million led by LG Technology Ventures - CTech
- Kurt Rohloff of Duality Technologies - The Tech Tribune
- Vinod Vaikuntanathan earns 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship - MIT EECS
- Vinod Vaikuntanathan earns 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship | MIT CSAIL
- MIT affiliates awarded 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology