By Julia Schwarz
Alex Lombardi, an expert in cryptography, has won a National Science Foundation CAREER award, one of the top honors for early career faculty.
The award is part of NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program and supports junior faculty who exemplify leadership in education and research. It comes with nearly $600,000 in research funding over five years.
Lombardi, an assistant professor of computer science, researches the theory and foundations of classical and quantum cryptography. His work focuses on a relatively new frontier in cryptography — how quantum computers change cryptographic capabilities.
The NSF award will support Lombardi’s work to develop a theoretical foundation for constructing and analyzing fundamental cryptographic protocols — like encryption, hash functions and digital signatures — that work in a post-quantum context. He is also exploring whether quantum computing could ultimately enable better security for basic cryptographic tasks, perhaps even guaranteeing security against an attacker capable of performing any classical computation instantaneously.
Lombardi joined the Princeton faculty in 2023. He earned his Ph.D. from MIT and spent a year as a Simons-Berkeley postdoctoral fellow at the University of California-Berkeley. His work has been recognized with a Google Scholar Award and outstanding doctoral dissertation awards from the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science and the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control. Lombardi has also received an E. Lawrence Keyes, Jr./Emerson Electric Co. Faculty Advancement Award and a commendation for outstanding teaching from Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.