Raluca Ada Popa
Computer scientist at UC Berkeley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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]
Raluca Ada Popa | |
|---|---|
Popa presenting at a conference in 2017 | |
| Born | 1986 or 1987 (age 39–40)[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 |
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.
