Matthew Franklin, a associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, has been awarded a prestigious science and engineering fellowship by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The fellowship, worth $625,000 over five years, will support Franklin's research in cryptography.

"It's a very nice surprise," said Franklin. The grant can be used for salaries, to support students or visiting scientists, or for business travel and equipment.

"It's a very prestigious award, and we're delighted he got it," said Dan Gusfield, chair of the computer science department at UC Davis. "It's a very elite group," he said. Gusfield noted that only 50 universities are invited to submit nominees each for the fellowships, of which 24 were awarded this year.

Franklin studies how to encrypt and protect messages and other information on the Internet, so that it is protected from hackers and criminals. For example, electronic commerce depends on being able to make secure credit card transactions, without the risk of card numbers being stolen or misused.

Recently, Franklin and Dan Boneh of Stanford University developed a new method for generating "public keys." Public and private keys are used to make secure transactions with the widely used Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) system. In the Franklin-Boneh scheme, which they call identity-based encryption, the public key used to encrypt a message is generated from a user's e-mail address. At present, keys have to be generated in advance and stored in a public database.

Franklin has also studied encryption systems for e-commerce, electronic voting systems and electronic campaign finance reform.

After completing his doctorate at Columbia University, Franklin worked at the Center for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam, the Netherlands; AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey; and most recently, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the Bay Area. He joined UC Davis in July 2000.