Simson Garfinkel (Assoc)

Simson L. Garfinkel is a Computer Scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Information Technology Laboratory. Garfinkel's research interests include big data, privacy, usability, social justice, and data fusion. He holds seven US patents and has published dozens of research articles for his work in computer security and digital forensics. He is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Senior Member, as a member of the National Association of Science Writers.

Garfinkel is the author or co-author of fourteen books on computing. He is perhaps best known for his book Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. His book Practical UNIX and Internet Security (co-authored with Gene Spafford and Alan Schwartz), has sold more than 250,000 copies and been translated into more than a dozen languages since the first edition was published in 1991. 

Prior earning his PhD, Garfinkel worked as a science journalist, during which time he wrote  more than a thousand articles about science, technology, and technology policy in the popular press. He has won numerous national journalism awards, including the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award. Today he mostly writes for MIT's Technology Review Magazine and the technologyreview.com website.

As an entrepreneur, Garfinkel founded five companies between 1989 and 2000, including Vineyard.NET, which provided Internet service on Martha's Vineyard to more than a thousand customers from 1995 through 2005, and Sandstorm Enterprises, an early developer of computer forensic tools.

Garfinkel received three Bachelor of Science degrees from MIT in 1987, a Master's of Science in Journalism from Columbia University in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2005.

1. 2013 Best Paper Award, "Language Translation for File Paths," DFRWS, Aug 4-7, Monterey
2. 2012 Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery (certificate)
3. 2011 Best Paper Award, "Forensic Carving of Network Packets and Associated Data Structures," Aug 1-3, New Orleans, LA
4. 2011 Information Systems Security Association Hall of Fame
5. 2011 Department of Defense Value Engineering Achievement Award, Bulk Extractor Program.
6. 2010 Best Paper Award, "Bringing Science to Digital Forensics with Standardized Forensic Corpora," Aug, Monterey, Canada.
7. 2005 George M. Sprowls Award for the best doctoral theses in computer science, Honorable Mention, awarded for "Design Principles and Patterns for Computer Systems That Are Simultaneously Secure and Usable" supervised by Robert Miller and David Clark.
8. 2005 Best Regular Column, Contributed (Gold) (Northeast Region, Under 80,000 circulation), awarded by the American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBPE), for the "Machine shop" series in CSO Magazine. (Award granted for the July and September 2004 columns.)
9. 2005 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award, for Best Regularly Featured Department or Column, awarded to CSO Magazine's "Machine Shop" column, by Simson Garfinkel (edited by Elaine Cummings, designed by Chandra Tallman with Steve Traynor).
10. 2004 Best Regular Column, Contributed (Gold) (National, Under 80,000), awarded by the American Association of Business Publishers and Editors (ASBPE), for the "Machine shop" series in CSO Magazine. (Award granted for the April and May 2003 columns.)
11. 2004 Best Regular Column, Contributed (Gold) (East Coast Region, Under 80,000 circulation), awarded by the American Society of Business Publication Editors] (ASBPE), East Coast Region, for the "Machine Shop" series in CSO Magazine.
12. 2004 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award, for Best Regularly Featured Department or Column, awarded to CSO Magazine's "Machine Shop" column, by Simson Garfinkel (edited by Elaine Cummings, designed by Chandra Tallman with Steve Traynor). (front)(back)
13. 2004 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award, Grand Neal Runner-up, 2nd place, CSO Magazine, "Machine Shop."
14. 2003 Best Regular Column, Contributed (Silver) (East Coast Region, Under 80,000 circulation), awarded by the American Society of Business Publication Editors], (ASBPE) for the "Machine Shop" series in  CSO Magazine.
15. 2002-2005 MIT Presidential Fellowship, for study in the field of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science.
16. 2000 Best COMPUTERS IN SOCIETY book, Third Annual BookBytes Awards, awarded for Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century.
17. 1999 Best Feature Series (West Coast Region, Circulation over 80,000), awarded by the awarded by the American Society of Business Publication Editors], for the "Privacy in the Internet Age" feature series appearing in PC World Magazine.
18. 1997 Award of Merit for Practical UNIX and Internet Security, International Technical Publications Competition, awarded by the Society for Technical Communication.
19. 1996 Award of Distinguished Technical Communication (highest award) for Practical UNIX and Internet Security, STC Boston/NNE Technical Publications Competition, awarded by the Society for Technical Communication
20. 1988 Winner of the Elisabbeta DiCagno Award "for the best investigative story on environmental protection or human rights," Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.