The Alfred Sloan Foundation has chosen Boaz Barak, an assistant professor of computer science, to receive a Sloan Research Fellowship. The selective grants are awarded “to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in science.”

Barak joined the University faculty in 2005, following two years as a postdoctoral member in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science in 2004 from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

His research interests include cryptography, or the secure encoding of information, and complexity theory, which explores the power of efficient computation. He is currently co-authoring a textbook on complexity theory, which is expected to be published in 2008.

In 2004, Barak was awarded the Association for Computing Machinery Dissertation Award for the best doctoral dissertation in computer science and engineering for his work on cryptography. He is an editor of the Theory of Computing Journal.

Barak was one of 116 scientists chosen to receive the fellowships this year. Among the winners were five other members of the Princeton faculty: mathematicians Simone Warzel and Jacob Rasmussen; physicists Anatoly Spitkovsky and Frans Pretorius; and economist Esteban Rossi-Hansberg.