Joan Feigenbaum (born 1958 in Brooklyn, New York) is a theoretical computer scientist with a background in mathematics. She is the Grace Murray Hopper Professor of Computer Science at Yale University.^[1] At Yale she also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Economics. Feigenbaum co-invented the computer-security research area of trust management.^[2]

Feigenbaum did her undergraduate work in Mathematics at Harvard University. She became interested in computers during the Summer Research Program at AT&T's Bell Labs between her junior and senior years. She then earned a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University, under the supervision of Andrew Yao,^[3] while working summers at Bell Labs. After graduation she joined Bell Labs. She became the Hopper Professor at Yale in 2008.^[1]

She is married to Jeffrey Nussbaum. They have a son, Sam Baum. Baum was chosen as the child's surname as the greatest common suffix of Feigenbaum and Nussbaum.^[4]

In 1998 Feigenbaum was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin.^[5] In 2001 she became a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for her "foundational and highly influential contributions to cryptographic complexity theory, authorization and trust management, massive-data-stream computation, and algorithmic mechanism design."^[6] In 2012 she was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science^[7] and, in 2013, a member^[8] of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. The Connecticut Technology Council chose her as a Woman of Innovation in 2012. She acts as one of the three award-committee members on ACM SIGecom test of time award.^[9]