Ha Tran hadn’t expected to get a gift from the federal government on her last birthday.
In April, Tran, an assistant professor at Concordia University of Edmonton, received the call that she had won a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Research Council of Canada (NSERC) the same day she blew out her birthday candles.
“I couldn’t believe that I got this,” said Tran, who also won a one-time Discovery Launch Supplement, on Wednesday. “I got really emotional and happy.”
Tran’s research in computational number theory as it relates to cryptography — or code-breaking — is all around us.
“Imagine you email your friend … usually the idea is that your message is not going to send directly like that, it’s going to be encoded,” said Tran, noting that it’s similar for banking transactions. “There is a crypto system you’re using for that.”
Now, she’s focusing her research on another method of encryption, lattice cryptography, to design better systems for transferring important information and personal data for the age of quantum computers.
Quantum computers, while they don’t exist yet, could be designed to break the difficult mathematical problems that encode much important information right now.
“In other words, the crypto system (right now) is based on this problem in the future,” said Tran, stressing that the possibility of quantum computers in very real. “When we have quantum computers, your data is not safe anymore in the future.”
The grant will support her individual operating funds over the next five years, which means she will be able to reduce teaching time and focus more on research.
But while Tran, who just finished her first year at Concordia, plans to travel for conferences and collaborate with colleagues as much as she can, she also wants to use the money to support student researchers.
Right now, she has two researchers working with her and hopes to use some funding to give senior undergraduates the change to build experience and knowledge in this growing area.
“The idea is usually I hire them in their second year, and we train them for one to three years,” said Tran, noting that many do a thesis on the topic in their final years. “Doing the research and perhaps can help a lot in terms of going to grad school and getting scholarships.”
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