Salil Vadhan, L. Mahadevan elected to National Academy of Sciences

Professors Salil Vadhan and L. Mahadevan are among 120 new members elected to the National Academy of Sciences this year, including 15 Harvard faculty members. 

Vadhan is the Vicky Joseph Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). 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 member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 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 has an undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer science from Harvard, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mahadevan is the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics. Mahadevan’s research seeks to understand motion and matter at the human scale, integrating the physical and biological sciences, mathematics and engineering, using experiments, theory and computation. 

His recent work has explored how brain folds emerge from differences in growth and thickness between brain layers, how very soft materials can support wake-like surface waves, and how adding a small amount of randomness to the motion of many robots can ease congestion in crowded spaces. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a MacArthur Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

The National Academy of Sciences, established in 1863, elects members in recognition of their “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.” Election to the NAS is considered one of the highest honors for scientists in the United States.