Dorit Aharonov

Dorit Aharonov (דורית אהרונוב; born 1970) is an Israeli computer scientist specializing in quantum computing.

Aharonov was born in Washington and grew up in Haifa, the daughter of the mathematician Dov Aharonov and the niece of the physicist Yakir Aharonov.

Aharonov graduated from Weizmann Institute of Science with an MSc in physics. She received her doctorate for Computer Science in 1999 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her thesis was entitled Noisy Quantum Computation. She also did her post-doctorate in the mathematics department of Princeton University and in the computer science department of University of California Berkeley. She was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1998–99.

Aharonov has won several awards for her research work. In 2005 she was chosen by Nature magazine as one of the four "most prominent young theorists in their field", and the following year she was awarded the Creel Prize for excellence in scientific research.

Aharonov was an invited speaker in International Congress of Mathematicians 2010, Hyderabad on the topic of "Mathematical Aspects of Computer Science".

She was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2024.

Research
Aharonov's research is mainly about quantum information processes, which includes:
 * quantum algorithms
 * quantum cryptography and computational complexity
 * quantum error corrections and fault tolerance
 * connections between quantum computation and quantum Markov chains and lattices
 * quantum Hamiltonian complexity and its connections to condensed matter physics
 * transition from quantum to classical physics
 * understanding entanglement by studying quantum complexity

Honors and awards

 * 2006 - Krill Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research
 * 2014 - the Michael Bruno Memorial Award
 * 2024 - elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences