Dana Moshkovitz is an assistant professor at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department in MIT. A member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAL) and a member of the Theory of Computation Group, she has served as the ITT Career Development Chair and received the Jerome Saltzer Award for teaching. Her main interests lie in Theoretical Computer Science, particularly in probabilistically checkable proofs (PCP), pseudorandomness, and coding theory.

She received her PhD in Mathematics and Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2008, under the supervision of Prof. Ran Raz. Her thesis, “Two-Query Probabilistic Checking of Proofs with Sub-Constant Error” earned her the Nessyahu Prize in Mathematics for Best PhD Thesis from the Israel Mathematical Union.

In her PhD, Dana presented a breakthrough in The Probabilistically Checkable Proof (PCP) Theorem, one of the most important and influential theorems ever proven in theoretical computer science. She constructed a PCP with both sub-constant error and almost linear size.

Prior to this, she graduated summa cum laude from the School of Computer Science in Tel-Aviv University, where she completed her MSc under the supervision of Prof. Muli Safra.

Dana was a postdoctoral fellow in a two-year joint program between Princeton University (hosted by Prof. Sanjeev Arora) and The Institute for Advanced Study (as part of Prof. Avi Wigderson’s group). She is the recipient of a multitude of awards including The Esther Hellinger Memorial Prize from the Feinberg Graduate School at the Weizmann Institute, the Best Paper Award at FOCS 2008 for “Two-Query PCP with Sub-Constant Error”, The Shimon Even Prize in theoretical computer science from the Weizmann Institute of Science, as well as the Otto Schwarz Foundation Excellence Award.