Samir Mitragotri, Salil Vadhan elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Samir Mitragotri and Salil Vadhan, faculty members in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), have been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Since 1780, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences has honored excellence and convened leaders across disciplines to “examine new ideas, address issues of importance, and work together to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people.”

New members are distinguished in academia, the arts, industry, policy, research, and science. Mitragotri and Vadhan join about 250 newly elected members in 2025, including 20 from across Harvard’s schools.

Mitragotri is the Hiller Professor of Bioengineering and the Hansjorg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering. His lab has made groundbreaking contributions to drug delivery and biomaterials, leading to new diagnoses and treatments for diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other conditions.

A core faculty member at the Wyss Institute, Mitragotri has pioneered novel technologies using ultrasound and ionic liquids to enable transdermal delivery of proteins, peptides, and siRNA. He has also invented systems for synthetic carriers to “hitchhike” on natural cells for targeted drug delivery.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Medicine, and National Academy of Inventors, and is an elected fellow of many academic organizations including the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Biomedical Engineering Society.

His B.S. in chemical engineering is from the Institute of Chemical Technology, India, and his Ph.D. in chemical engineering is from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Vadhan is the Vicky Joseph Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. His research in theoretical computer science spans computational complexity, cryptography, randomness in computation, and data privacy.

A member of Harvard’s Theory of Computation research group, Vadhan also leads Harvard’s Privacy Tools Project and co-leads the OpenDP open-source differential privacy software project. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a Simons Investigator, and has been honored, among other things, with a Harvard College Professorship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

He and co-authors received the “Test of Time Award” at the 2024 Theory of Cryptography Conference for “Notions of Reducibility Between Cryptographic Primitives,” and the Distinguished Artifact Award at the 2023 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security for code accompanying the paper “A Framework for Differential Privacy Against Timing Attacks.”

His other accolades include the 2009 Godel Prize for the paper “Entropy Waves, the Zig-Zag Graph Product and New Constant-Degree Expanders” (with Reingold and Wigderson) and the 2011 SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize for “Statistically Hiding Commitments and Statistical Zero-Knowledge Arguments from any One-Way Function” (with Haitner, Nguyen, Ong, and Reingold).

His undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer science is from Harvard, and his Ph.D. in applied mathematics is from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Induction ceremonies for new Academy members will take place in Cambridge, Massachusetts in October.