Vadim Lyubashevsky
The IBM Research Zurich cryptographer who co-designed both Kyber and Dilithium, the lattice-based algorithms NIST standardised in 2024.
Two of Lyubashevsky's early papers hold up much of modern post-quantum cryptography. "Fiat–Shamir with aborts" (2009) showed how to build signatures from lattice problems without the signatures leaking the secret key: you simply throw away any candidate that would reveal too much and try again. A year later he defined ring-LWE with Chris Peikert and Oded Regev, a structured-lattice variant of Regev's problem that keeps key sizes tolerable.
Both ideas fed into the CRYSTALS suite. Kyber became ML-KEM (FIPS 203) and Dilithium became ML-DSA (FIPS 204) in August 2024 — which means a rejection loop from 2009 now ships in browsers and operating systems.