Dakshita Khurana

Dakshita Khurana received a B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering (Power) from IIT Delhi in 2012 and a PhD in Computer Science from UCLA in 2018. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft from 2018-19 before joining UIUC as an Assistant Professor in 2019. 

 

Her research focuses on theoretical cryptography. She has contributed to the foundations of cryptographic protocols, including to privacy-preserving proof systems, and to preventing man-in-the-middle attacks. Her more recent work investigates the foundations of quantum cryptography. Her research has been recognized as a long plenary talk at QIP and been published by invitation at the SIAM Journal on Computing. 

 

Dakshita's research has been funded through grants from the NSF and DARPA, and gifts from Visa Research, C3AI and Jump Arches. She was named to the Forbes List of 30 under 30 in Science. She was also a Google Research Fellow at the Simons Institute, Berkeley. Previously, her thesis work was recognized with a UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship, a UCLA CS Outstanding Graduating PhD Award and Graduate Student Research Awards from Symantec and CISCO.