Leonard M. Adleman is the Henry Salvatori Chair in Computer Science and a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering, in the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science.
He is the “A” in RSA, the public-key cryptosystem he co-invented in 1977 with Ronald Rivest and Adi Shamir while at MIT. Their paper introduced the encryption and digital signature scheme that bears the three inventors’ initials.
Adleman later founded the field of DNA computation, demonstrating that biological molecules can be used to solve computational problems. His USC faculty page describes research spanning cryptography, algorithms, number theory, and quantum computing in addition to this work.
For the RSA work, Adleman shared the 2002 ACM Turing Award with Rivest and Shamir.