Raluca Ada Popa
Raluca Ada Popa | |
|---|---|
Popa presenting at a conference in 2017 | |
| Born | 1986 or 1987 (age 38–39)[1] |
| Awards | Grace Murray Hopper Award (2019) |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD, MEng, BS) |
| Thesis | Building practical systems that compute on encrypted data (2014) |
| Nickolai Zeldovich | |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Computer science |
Sub-discipline | Functional encryption, Homomorphic encryption |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
Raluca Ada Popa is a computer science associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on applied cryptography, including in the fields of healthcare and banking.[2][1] Popa was awarded the 2021 Grace Murray Hopper Award for "contributions to the design of more practical distributed systems for secure computation over encrypted data."[3]
Biography
Raluca Ada Popa was born in Sibiu, a city in central Romania, in 1986 or 1987.[1] She studied computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a BS in 2009 and an MEng in 2010. Popa continued her studies at MIT, studying under cryptography researcher Nickolai Zeldovich. She graduated with a PhD in 2014, with a dissertation titled Building practical systems that compute on encrypted data.[4]
In 2011, Popa and her colleagues and advisor at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory developed CryptDB, a new technology for homomorphic encryption in SQL databases.[5][6] A 2024 paper described CryptDB as "the first encrypted database scheme supporting all standard SQL queries over the encrypted data without any client-side query processing."[7]
Popa completed a postdoctoral fellowship at ETH Zurich, and joined the faculty of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering in 2015. She is the co-founder of cybersecurity startup companies PreVeil and Opaque Systems.[1][4]
In 2019, Popa was awarded the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for her contributions to the design of secure distributed systems.[3] She joined the staff of Google DeepMind as a research scientist in 2025, working on cybersecurity in generative AI systems.[8]
Personal life
In a 2023 interview with Libertatea, Popa said that she has one child.[2]
Selected publications
- Popa, Raluca Ada; Redfield, Catherine M. S.; Zeldovich, Nickolai; Balakrishnan, Hari (2011). CryptDB: protecting confidentiality with encrypted query processing. Proceedings of the Twenty-Third ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 85–100. doi:10.1145/2043556.2043566. hdl:1721.1/74107. ISBN 978-1-4503-0977-6.
References
- ^ a b c d Rosen, Jonathan W. (2019-06-25). "Visionaries: Raluca Ada Popa". MIT Technology Review.
- ^ a b c Nistoroiu, Alexandra (2023-04-20). "Mesaj de încredere în țară de la tânăra din Sibiu cu două start-upuri în SUA: „Văd enorm de mult progres în România. Știu că românii văd în continuare partea negativă. Și eu, aici, văd partea negativă din California"". Libertatea (in Romanian). Retrieved 2025-12-22.
- ^ a b "ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award: Raluca Ada Popa". Association for Computing Machinery. 2021. Retrieved 2025-12-22.
- ^ a b "Raluca Ada Popa". UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Retrieved 2026-01-09.
- ^ Popa, Raluca Ada; Zeldovich, Nickolai (August 2015). "How to compute with data you can't see". IEEE Spectrum. 52 (8): 42–47. doi:10.1109/MSPEC.2015.7164401. ISSN 0018-9235.
- ^ Guy, Ann Brody (2020). "Reinventing Cybersecurity: Privacy, potential and the new data economy" (PDF). BerkeleyENGINEER. Vol. 17. pp. 12–15.
- ^ Shi, Gongyu; Wang, Geng; Sun, Shi-Feng; Gu, Dawu (2024-09-01). "Efficient cryptanalysis of an encrypted database supporting data interoperability". The VLDB Journal. 33 (5): 1357–1375. doi:10.1007/s00778-024-00852-1. ISSN 0949-877X. Retrieved 2026-01-09.
- ^ Wodecki, Ben (2025-10-07). "Google DeepMind unveils AI agent that automatically patches software vulnerabilities". SDxCentral. Retrieved 2026-02-24.