Aayush Jain, who received his PhD in 2021 from UCLA Computer Science under the supervision of Professor Amit Sahai, was awarded the prestigious 2026 Sloan Research Fellowship for his research in Cryptography. Now an assistant professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Jain is one of 22 Sloan Computer Science Fellows chosen among faculty members throughout North America. The two-year, $75,000 fellowship honors the most promising scientific researchers working today.
“Aayush’s research pushes the frontier in our understanding of some of the deepest questions in cryptography,” said Prof. Sahai, the Symantec Endowed Chair in Computer Science at UCLA.
During his time at UCLA, Jain – together with Sahai and Huijia (Rachel) Lin of the University of Washington – solved a two-decade-old open problem by constructing the first indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) scheme based on well-studied security assumptions. The breakthrough, which Quanta Magazine described as achieving the “crown jewel” of cryptography, received the Best Paper Award at the 2021 ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC). Jain’s doctoral dissertation was subsequently honored with the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for the best PhD thesis in computer science worldwide.
A full list of 2026 Sloan Research Fellows is available here: https://sloan.org/fellowships/2026-Fellows