2025 Julie B. Kerr Award for Excellence in Research

Douglas “Doug” Jungreis is the recipient of the 2026 Julie B. Kerr Award for Excellence in Research. The award is named in honor of a late Center for Communications Research, La Jolla (CCR-L) researcher and is given to an IDA employee who has demonstrated research excellence and exceptional analytic achievement in the IDA research community.

Doug's 30 plus years of work at CCR-L are noteworthy for the number and variety of problems to which he has made major contributions. Early in his career at IDA, Doug contributed to numerous cryptanalytic efforts that allowed the National Security Agency to read messages encrypted by a variety of adversaries. He was instrumental in developing an abstract mathematical algorithm that later became a key component in multiple operations. More recently, in SCAMP 2022, he led a project that revisited a mathematical algorithm the community had believed was optimized 15 years earlier. His team demonstrated substantial improvements, dramatically reducing time-to-solution of an important computational problem.

Additionally, Doug’s work has stood out for the amount of people he has worked with, including Julie Kerr, the namesake for this award. Beyond research, Doug has also contributed to the community by helping colleagues communicate their work effectively.

Congratulations to Doug for his work that has so benefited IDA and the national security mission.