Kristin Lauter
Mathematician who moved homomorphic encryption and isogeny-based cryptography from the blackboard into code.
Lauter led the cryptography group at Microsoft Research for many years. There she pushed to make homomorphic encryption — computing directly on encrypted data, after Craig Gentry's 2009 breakthrough — usable in practice, notably through the Microsoft SEAL library and applications to encrypted medical data.
She is also one of the authors of the Charles–Goren–Lauter hash (2006), built on isogeny graphs of elliptic curves — an early stone in the branch of post-quantum cryptography that later saw both successes and spectacular collapses. Since 2021 she has been at Meta. She served as president of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 2015 to 2017.