Huijia (Rachel) Lin

Huijia (Rachel) Lin is a professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where she holds the Ed Lazowska Endowed Professorship. Her research explores the possibilities and limits of cryptography: which capabilities can be realized, what assumptions they require, and how security holds up when many parties and protocols interact. She has made foundational contributions to program obfuscation, functional encryption, secure multiparty computation, non-malleability, and concurrent security; her work on indistinguishability obfuscation gave the first construction of this central primitive from well-founded assumptions. Her recent work brings cryptographic guarantees to AI-generated content and models.

Lin’s research has received best-paper honors at STOC and EUROCRYPT, and she is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award. In 2022 she was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians and was named one of Science News’s “10 Scientists to Watch”; she gave an invited talk at EUROCRYPT 2025.

Lin earned her PhD in computer science from Cornell University, completed postdoctoral research at MIT CSAIL and Boston University, and was an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara before joining the University of Washington.