This grant funds work by Alice Silverberg of the University of California, Irvine to bring together mathematicians, cryptologists, and computer scientists in a concerted research effort to build on recent breakthroughs in fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).  FHE is a promising new encryption technique that allows accurate computation on encrypted data, allowing third parties to perform calculations on datasets without the need to decrypt them first. Recent mathematical breakthroughs in FHE have shown it to be theoretically possible, though extant techniques are too slow and unwieldy for practical use.  Silverstein’s project will bring attention and intellectual firepower to the issue, in the hopes of eventually crafting more feasible FHE approaches, with consequent benefits for the conduct of privacy-preserving research by allowing scientific analysis of private, proprietary, and otherwise sensitive data.