Rate My Professor Daniel Bernstein

Daniel J. Bernstein is a Research Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from New York University in 1991 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1995, advised by Hendrik W. Lenstra, Jr. Bernstein began his academic career at the University of Illinois Chicago in 1995 as Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science. He advanced to Assistant Professor (1998–2001), Associate Professor (2001–2005, with tenure), Professor (2005–2008), and has served as Research Professor in Computer Science since 2008. Throughout his tenure, he has been Principal Investigator on numerous National Science Foundation grants, including DMS–9600083 (1996–1999), DMS–9970409 (1999–2002), CCR–9983950 (2000–2005), DMS–0140542 (2002–2007), and ITR–0716498 (2007–2010, $400,000), supporting research in algorithmic number theory, cryptography, and high-speed cryptographic implementations. Bernstein held visiting appointments such as Key Senior Scientist at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (2000), Visiting Scholar at the University of Sydney (2004), Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Denmark (2006), and Senior Scientific Researcher at the Fields Institute (2006). He has also been a visiting professor at Eindhoven University of Technology and at Ruhr University Bochum through 2023.

Bernstein specializes in computational number theory, computational commutative algebra, cryptography, and computer security. His influential publications include "Curve25519: new Diffie-Hellman speed records" (PKC 2006, over 1,600 citations, recipient of the 2022 PKC Test-of-Time Award), "Cache-timing attacks on AES" (2005, over 1,200 citations), "High-speed high-security signatures" introducing Ed25519 (CHES 2011, over 1,200 citations), "ChaCha, a variant of Salsa20" (2008, over 880 citations), "Detecting perfect powers in essentially linear time" (1998), and "SPHINCS: practical stateless hash-based signatures" (EUROCRYPT 2015). He co-developed SPHINCS+ (CCS 2019), selected by NIST for standardization as FIPS 205 (SLH-DSA) in 2024 to provide quantum-resistant digital signatures; Bernstein coined "post-quantum cryptography" in 2003. He edited the book Post-Quantum Cryptography (Springer, 2009). Awards include the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2002–2006, $40,000). Elsevier ranked him in the top 2% of scientists worldwide for career-long impact and single-year impact in 2020. His cryptographic primitives, such as Curve25519, Ed25519, ChaCha20, and Poly1305, are widely deployed in protocols like TLS.