Democratizing Cryptography

Rebecca Slayton is Associate Professor in the Department of Science & Technology Studies and the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, both at Cornell University. Slayton's research and teaching examine the relationships between and among risk, governance, and expertise, with a focus on international security and cooperation since World War II. Her first book, Arguments that Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949–2012 (MIT Press, 2013), shows how the rise of a new field of expertise in computing reshaped public policies and perceptions about the risks of missile defense in the United States. In 2015, Arguments that Count won the Computer History Museum Book Prize, awarded annually to an outstanding book in computing history that was published during the prior three years. Slayton's second book project, Shadowing Cybersecurity, examines the emergence of cybersecurity expertise through the interplay of innovation and repair. In 2019, Slayton was a recipient of the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for her National Science Foundation CAREER project entitled, "Enacting Cybersecurity Expertise."