Lorrie Cranor honored as 2025 Stibitz-Wilson Award recipient

For more than 20 years, the American Computer & Robotics Museum’s (ACRM) Stibitz-Wilson Awards have recognized pioneering individuals whose work has powerfully impacted modern life.

Lorrie Cranor, Director of the CyLab Security and Privacy Institute, was one of five Stibitz-Wilson Award recipients honored at this year’s event, Code for Tomorrow: Innovating for Classrooms, Communities, and Conservation.

Cranor’s research in online privacy, usable security, and public policy has helped define the way individuals and organizations protect personal information in the digital age. She has co-authored more than 200 research papers in these areas, and has played a key role in building the usable privacy and security research community.

Cranor has testified about privacy issues at a congressional hearing and at workshops held by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission. She is frequently quoted in the press and has appeared on the “Today Show,” “CBS Sunday Morning,” “CNN Financial News,” “NPR Morning Edition,” “NPR Science Friday” and “NPR All Things Considered.” Her “TED Talk” on passwords has been viewed more than 1.6 million times.

The 2025 Stibitz-Wilson Awards ceremony took place on September 26 at The Ellen Theatre in Bozeman, Montana. After accepting her award from ACRM president Barbara Keremedjiev, Cranor gave a presentation that highlighted her work on passwords, privacy choices, privacy-related art, and how to explain privacy to young children.

“It was wonderful meeting all the amazing award recipients and getting to know them,” said Cranor. “The American Computer & Robotics Museum rolled out the red carpet for us. We toured the museum, had lunch with the president of Montana State University, and visited Yellowstone National Park with museum staff, board members, and some of the previous winners.”

Established in 1997, the Stibitz-Wilson Awards pay tribute to past and present innovators in the computational and biological sciences. Named after George Stibitz, an early pioneer of digital computing, and Robert Wilson, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, the awards celebrate the spirit of scientific curiosity and discovery that drives technological progress.

In addition to Cranor, this year’s recipients included:

• Serge Belongie and Pietro Perona, computer vision and machine learning innovators whose work on visual recognition and human-centered AI underpins the wildly popular Merlin Bird ID app.

• Yasmin Kafai, who champions designing and coding digital games and interactive media as groundbreaking learning modalities for children.

• Mitchel Resnick, who develops creative learning tools like Scratch, helping children explore coding through hands-on experimentation.