Professor Dr. Sebastian Faust, TU Darmstadt, and Professor Dr. Stefan Dziembowski, University of Warsaw, have been selected to receive the 2020 Copernicus Award from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP) for their services to German-Polish research collaboration. The jury appointed by the DFG and the FNP chose the two researchers for their outstanding cooperation in theoretical cryptography and IT security. Their joint research on the mathematical foundations of encryption techniques has significantly contributed towards making the use of information technologies and the associated data transfer process more secure against attack and more efficient at the same time. The vital contribution of their work, in the jury's view, lies in the way they bring different security models together.
Sebastian Faust is a professor at TU Darmstadt, where he heads the department of Applied Cryptography. Stefan Dziembowski is a professor at the University of Warsaw, where he leads the Cryptography and Blockchain Technologies working group. Faust and Dziembowski have been collaborating for approximately ten years, since they first met at a specialist conference. This long-standing partnership has resulted in a large number of publications.
The two cryptographers are the eighth pair to receive the Copernicus Award from the DFG and the FNP. Since 2006, the 200,000 Euro award has been presented every two years to two researchers, one from Germany and one from Poland. It takes its name from the astronomer Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) and is intended to symbolise the close research collaboration between the countries. The prize money is financed by the DFG and the FNP in equal shares and is divided evenly between the two prizewinners, who may use it for any scientific purpose within the scope of the funding programmes of both organisations. Priority should be given to jointly supporting early career researchers.
Founded in 1991, the FNP is an independent and financially autonomous not-for-profit non-governmental organisation in Poland whose purpose is to fund research. Since 2005, it has had a cooperation agreement with the DFG, which includes the joint awarding of the Copernicus Award.
