Dwork awarded 2026 Japan Prize

Cynthia Dwork, the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been awarded the 2026 Japan Prize from her contributions to “leading research for building an ethical digital society, including differential privacy and fairness.”

The Japan Prize is awarded annually to scientists and engineers from around the world who “have contributed significantly to the peace and prosperity of humankind through original and outstanding achievements that have greatly advanced the progress of science and technology.” Every year, two scientific fields are selected for the award. This year, the two fields eligible for the award were Life Sciences and Electronics, Information, and Communication, for which Dwork was awarded. 

Dwork is a pioneer of differential privacy, a strong privacy guarantee and a collection of methods that allow researchers to analyze large data sets containing sensitive personal information – such as medical and mortgage application records – while preserving the privacy of the individuals whose information is contained therein. The mathematical technique she and colleagues first pioneered in the mid-2000s is now widely deployed in industry and was the backbone of the Disclosure Avoidance System for the 2020 U.S. Census, which allowed the analysis of respondents’ data while maintaining strict privacy guidelines.

More than a decade before her landmark work on differential privacy, Dwork worked to solve a different problem — the rising tide of spam emails. In 1993, she proposed a new system, known as “proof of work,” which adds a small amount of computational effort to tasks like sending an email. This computational effort doesn’t impact ordinary users but adds up, making it too computationally expensive to send millions of emails at once. 

The “proof of work” idea was later adopted in blockchain and today forms the basis of cryptocurrencies. In Bitcoin, a user pays a computational cost to add a block of transactions to the chain, making the system safer — since cheating and large-scale attacks become prohibitively expensive — and more democratic. 

More recently,  Dwork and collaborators have been focused on the theoretical investigation of algorithmic fairness, a field now experiencing explosive growth.

In the award citation, The Japan Prize Foundation wrote: “Dwork’s research presents definitive, mathematical solutions to the critical challenges facing our digital society now and in the future, thereby bridging theory and practice and establishing a strong foundation for both academic research and society itself.”

The award ceremony will be in April and will be attended by the reigning Emperor and Empress, according to the The Japan Prize Foundation.  

In 2024, Dwork was awarded the National Medal of Science. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and is a fellow of the ACM, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She has received multiple awards in four different fields, including the 30-Year Test-of-Time Award at the 2022 ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, in cryptography; and the 2007 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, in distributed computing. Her Ph.D. in computer science is from Cornell University.