Dr. Sarah Scheffler

Assistant Professor, Software and Societal Systems

Bio

Sarah Scheffler is an Assistant Professor joint between the Department of Engineering and Public Policy within the College of Engineering, and the Software and Societal Systems Department within the School of Computer Science, and is also a core faculty within CyLab, CMU’s Security and Privacy Institute. Her research centers on applied cryptography and its intersection with policy, especially content moderation with verification and privacy, end-to-end encryption, compelled decryption, privacy-respecting and verifiable data journalism, and private and secure autonomous systems. She also does research in “pure” applied cryptography, including works on zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computation. Her Ph.D. is in computer science from Boston University, and prior to joining CMU in 2024 she was a postdoc at MIT’s Internet Policy Research Initiative, and in Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Her research areas of interest are, Computing Technology and Policy & Privacy and Security.