Presented by: Chairman Martin Meyerson of The Marconi Foundation; President John Jay Iselin of that foundation at Columbia University, New York City.

Dr. Diffie and Professor Hellman developed public-key cryptography in 1976. This breakthrough, and the Diffie-Hellman algorithm for key exchange, allows secure transmission of information over the Internet. Dr. Diffie is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University and Professor Hellman is a Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.

The two also received the prestigious 2015 A.M. Turing Award, an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), for their encryption work.