Tal Malkin

Tal Malkin is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, directing the Cryptography Lab and serving as inaugural chair of the Cybersecurity Center at Columbia's Data Science Institute. She holds a Ph.D. from MIT (2000), joined Columbia after AT&T Labs research experience, and focuses on cryptography, security, complexity theory with applications in secure computation, zero-knowledge proofs, and privacy-preserving systems.

Education:

• B.S. in Math and Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University
• M.S. in Computer Science, Weizmann Institute of Science
• Ph.D. in Computer Science, MIT (2000)

Research Interests: Malkin's work spans foundational and applied cryptography, including homomorphic encryption, lattice-based protocols, attribute-based encryption, and tamper-resilient systems. She explores intersections with machine learning and information theory, addressing challenges in multi-party computation, public-key encryption, and side-channel resistance.

Scientific Contributions: Her publications include breakthroughs in non-malleable codes, secure computation, and privacy-preserving databases. Notable works involve continual leakage resilience, optimally-fair coin tossing, and garbled circuits for efficient cryptographic protocols.

Awards & Grants: Recipient of the NSF CAREER award, IBM and Google faculty research awards, and the IACR Fellow designation. Her research is funded by NSF, NSA, DHS, NYSIA, IARPA, and industry partnerships with Google, IBM, Mitsubishi, and NEC.

Professional Leadership: Former conference chairs at CRYPTO 2021, CCS 2017, and CT-RSA conferences. Active in program committees for over 20 leading cryptography and security events, including FOCS, Eurocrypt, and Real World Crypto.

Advising: Supervised numerous Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers, including Marshall Ball, Chengyu Lin, and Negev Shekhel Nosatzki. Her lab has mentored graduates like Ghada Almashaqbeh (2019) and Fernando Krell (2016), focusing on decentralized networks, secure learning, and cryptographic primitives.