Directors

Ari Juels
IC3 Co-Director

Ari Juels is the Weill Family Foundation and Joan and Sanford I. Weill Professor in the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion and a Computer Science faculty member at Cornell University. He is also Chief Scientist at Chainlink. He was formerly the Chief Scientist of RSA, Director of RSA Laboratories, and a Distiguished Engineer at EMC (now Dell EMC), where he worked until 2013. His reseach areas of interest include blockchains, cryptocurrency, and smart contracts, as well as applied cryptography, cloud security, user authentication, and privacy. (Photo by Patricia Kuharic)

Ittay Eyal
IC3 Associate Director

Ittay Eyal is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technion. His research focuses on the security and scalability of decentralized systems, including blockchain performance, blockchain and smart-contract mechanism design, and authentication.

Giulia Fanti
IC3 Associate Director

Giulia Fanti is the Angel Jordan Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests span the security, privacy, and efficiency of distributed systems. She is a two-time fellow of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Cybersecurity and a member of NIST’s Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board. Her work has been recognized with several awards, including best paper awards, a Sloan Fellowship, an Intel Rising Star Faculty Award, and an ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star Award. She obtained her Ph.D. in EECS from U.C. Berkeley and her B.S. in ECE from Olin College of Engineering.

Andrew Miller
IC3 Associate Director

Andrew Miller is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include all facets of cryptocurrency science, from measurement and simulation to theory and formal modelling. His lectures can be found in the first cryptocurrency textbook and MOOC.

Staff

Sarah Allen
IC3 Research Program Manager

Sarah Allen is the IC3 Research Program Manager, supporting interactions among faculty, students, industry partners, and broader blockchain community. She works to promote collaborative, multidisciplinary blockchain research.

Jim Ballingall
IC3 Executive Director

Jim Ballingall is the IC3 Executive Director, responsible for community outreach, engagement, and support of the IC3 partners and ecosystem. Jim earned a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Cornell, and a B.S. in Engineering Physics from U.C. Berkeley. Jim also directs the Industry-Academia Partnership, a consortium founded by Cornell with other top universities and leading companies pursuing next generation computing technologies.

Sylvain Bellemare
IC3 Research Engineer

Sylvain is a research engineer at IC3. His role at IC3 involves helping with implementing and testing software prototypes, meanwhile applying software engineering best practices. His interest is in distributed systems and cryptographic protocols.

Oana Gherman
IC3 Sr. Administrative Assistant

Oana Gherman is the IC3 Senior Administrative Assistant, responsible for supporting the IC3 directors, faculty, and students, and for planning and coordinating IC3 events.

Jia (Bria) Han
IC3 Community Manager

Bria Han is the IC3 Community Manager, supporting IC3 faculty, students, industry partners and broader blockchain community by promoting collaborative interactions. She graduated from Harvard University and has multidisciplinary interests in enterprise blockchain, blockchain law and policy.

Amy Zhao
IC3 Data Scientist

Amy is a data scientist at IC3, and her role involves applying research topics on real world blockchain data. She received her Master's degree in Computer Science from Cornell Tech in 2024 and works as a solutions engineer at Ava Labs. Amy is interested in the practical implementation of blockchain technology in industry.

Chief Scientist

Elaine Shi
IC3 Chief Scientist

Elaine Shi is an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. 99% of programmers in the real world are not cryptography experts, and it is dangerous for them to cook up their own cryptographic protocols. Elaine's research creates platforms and tools that aids non-expert programmers in creating systems that are "secure by design" and "secure by default".

Faculty / Scientists

Lorenzo Alvisi

Lorenzo Alvisi is the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, where he also serves as Department Chair. His research interests are in the theory and practice of distributed computing, with a particular focus on dependability. He is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award. He serves on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems and Springer’s Distributed Computing.

Christian Cachin

Christian Cachin is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Bern, where he has been leading the Cryptology and Data Security Research Group since 2019. With a background in cryptography, he is interested in all aspects of security in distributed systems and especially in cryptographic protocols, consistency, consensus, blockchains, and cloud-computing security.

Srdjan Capkun

Srdjan Capkun, is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich and Director of the Zurich Information Security and Privacy Center (ZISC). His research interests are in system and network security.

Will Cong

Will Cong is a Finance Professor and the current holder of the Rudd Family Endowed Professorship in Management at Cornell University. He is also a Department editor at the Management Science, Research Associate at the NBER, founding director of FinTech at Cornell Initiative, (co-)founder of the Digital Economy and Financial Technology (DEFT) Lab and multiple international research forums (e.g., ABFR and CBER), and was formerly a faculty member at the University of Chicago, Kauffman Junior Fellow, Poets & Quants World Best Business School Professor, George P. Shultz Scholar, and Lieberman Fellow at Stanford University. He studies applied economic theory, financial economics, and information economics, with a focus on interdisciplinary topics entailing tokenomics, IO and design of blockchains, DeFi, AI for finance, and how digitization and big data interact with and influence competition, growth, and entrepreneurship. He is the recipient of numerous best paper prizes and grants and has been a highly sought-after keynote speaker at various international conferences and advisor for leading FinTech firms, quant funds, and regulatory agencies around the globe.

Bryan Ford

Prof. Bryan Ford leads the Decentralized/Distributed Systems (DEDIS) lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Ford focuses broadly on building secure decentralized systems, touching on topics including private and anonymous communication technologies, Internet architecture, and secure operating systems.

James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann is a professor of law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. He studies how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power. He helps lawyers and technologists understand each other, applying ideas from computer science to problems in law and vice versa. He is the author of the casebook Internet Law: Cases and Problems and of over forty scholarly articles and essays on digital copyright, search engine regulation, privacy on social networks, online governance, and other topics in computer and Internet law. He teaches courses in property, intellectual property, and Internet law.

Sarah Meiklejohn

Sarah Meiklejohn is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Cryptography and Security at University College London. She has broad research interests in computer security and cryptography, and works on topics such as anonymity and criminal abuses in cryptocurrencies and privacy-enhancing technologies.

Andrew Myers

Andrew Myers is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. His research interests include computer security, programming languages, and distributed and persistent programming systems. His work has focused on practical, sound, expressive languages and systems for enforcing information security by construction. The Jif programming language makes it possible to write programs which the compiler ensures are secure, and the Fabric system extends this approach to distributed programming. Myers is an ACM Fellow and co-Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Computer Security.

Christine Parlour

Christine A. Parlour is the Sylvan C. Coleman Chair of Finance and Accounting at Berkeley Haas. Most of her work is in institutionally complex areas, such as market microstructure, FinTech and Banking. Her current work focuses on changes in the payments system and the effects on bank balance sheets and FinTech, especially Decentralized Finance. She has written for major finance and economics journals. She has been on the Nasdaq Economic Advisory Board and is currently on the steering committee for the New Special Study of Securities Markets. She is the current president of the Western Finance Association, past president of the Finance Theory Group and co-director of Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence (RDI).

Rafael Pass

Rafael Pass is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University (Cornell Tech). His research focuses on Cryptography and Game Theory and their interplay with Computational Complexity. He is a recipient of the NSF Career Award, the AFOSR Young Investigator Award, and the Google Faculty Award and was named a Alfred P Sloan Fellow, a Microsoft Faculty Fellow, and a Wallenberg Academy Fellow.

Eswar Prasad

Eswar Prasad is the Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy and professor of economics at Cornell University. He is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the New Century Chair in International Trade Economics, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former head of the IMF's China Division. Prasad is the author of The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance (Harvard University Press, 2021), Gaining Currency: The Rise of the Renminbi (Oxford, 2016), and The Dollar Trap: How the U.S. Dollar Tightened Its Grip on Global Finance (Princeton, 2014).

Robbert van Renesse

Robbert van Renesse is a Principal Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. His research is in the area of the theory and practice of scalable fault tolerant distributed systems. Van Renesse is Chair of ACM SIGOPS, an ACM Fellow, and Associate Editor of ACM Computing Surveys.

Carla L. Reyes

Professor Reyes is an Associate Professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law, in Dallas, Texas. Professor Reyes is a nationally recognized leader on issues raised by the intersection of business law and blockchain technology. Professor Reyes served as the Chair of the Texas Work Group on Blockchain Matters from September 2021-November 2022. Professor Reyes was also named an American Bar Foundation Fellow in June 2021 and named one of the Women of Legal Tech 2020, an honor bestowed by the American Bar Association Legal Technology Resource Center. Professor Reyes currently serves as the Associate Research Director of the Permanent Editorial Board of the UCC (a co-appointment with Andrea Tosato, Penn Law), the Research Director for the Uniform Law Commission’s Technology Committee, an Expert Member of the UNIDROIT Work Group on Best Practices for Effective Enforcement, was an Advisor to Joint ALI/ULC Drafting Committee on the Uniform Commercial Code and Emerging Technologies, and was an Expert Member of the UNIDROIT Work Group on Digital Assets and Private Law. Prior to joining SMU Dedman School of Law, Professor Reyes served Michigan State University College of Law as an Assistant Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Law, Technology & Innovation. Prior to teaching law, Professor Reyes practiced law as an associate in the Blockchain Technology and Digital Currency industry group at Perkins Coie LLP. Professor Reyes also contributes to blockchain technology initiatives at Stanford CodeX as a RegTrax Curator, MIT’s Cryptoeconomic Systems program, the University College London’s Blockchain Research Centre as a Research Associate, and the American Bar Association.

Dawn Song

Dawn Song is Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she was an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University from 2002 to 2007. Her research interest lies in security and privacy issues in computer systems. She is the recipient of many prestigious awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, and Best Paper Awards from top conferences. She is the founder of Ensighta Security Inc., which was acquired by FireEye Inc.

Senior Fellows

Roni Michaely

Roni Michaely is a professor of Finance and Entrepreneurialship at The University of Hong Kong. Before that he spent a significant portion of his career as The Rudd Family professor of Finance at Cornell University and Cornell Tech. His primary research interests are in the areas of empirical corporate finance, corporate governance, entrepreneurial finance, and FinTech. His current research focuses on how frictions in capital markets affect managers' corporate decisions and new product developments; with a particular focus on corporate payout policy, the effect of competition in firms' behavior, and on the impact of Fintech on capital market efficiency.

Maureen O'Hara

Maureen O'Hara is the Robert W. Purcell Professor of Finance at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, and she also holds a Professorship at the University of Technology Sydney. Professor O'Hara's research focuses on issues in market microstructure, and she is the author of numerous journal articles as well as the classic book Market Microstructure Theory (Blackwell: 1995). Recent research looks at the how ETFs affect market stability, liquidity issues in corporate bond markets, and corporate governance problems in banks.

Postdocs

Jayamine Alupotha

Jayamine Alupotha is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the University of Bern's CRYPTO group led by Professor Christian Cachin. She is mainly into privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols.

Yujin (Kwon) Potter

I'm a postdoc at UC Berkeley. I received BS and PhD from KAIST in 2016 and 2021, respectively. My research is involved in DeFi, blockchains, privacy, game theory, economics, and data analysis.

Philipp Schneider

Philipp Schneider is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bern, within the CRYPTO group led by Professor Christian Cachin. His research interests revolve around computational and security aspects of distributed systems.

Kyle Soska

I am an early cryptocurrency enthusiast that got my start by studying Silk Road and the darknet marketplace ecosystem in late 2013 during my PhD at Carnegie Mellon University and since then have been working on applications and privacy of decentralized ledger technologies in a Postdoc at UIUC. More recently I have focused my attention on cryptocurrency finance, both centralized (BitMEX, Binance, etc.) and decentralized with particular interest on the economics and incentives of DeFi primitives such as staking, farming, play2earn, algo stablecoins and more.

Students

Amit Agarwal

Amit is a PhD student under Professor Andrew Miller at UIUC currently doing research in theoretical and applied cryptography. His other research interests include consensus algorithms, quantum computation, and algorithm design.

James Austgen

James is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at Cornell University working with prof. Ari Juels. His interests include blockchains, cryptocurrency, privacy, and smart contracts.

Bolton Bailey

Bolton is a PhD Student at UIUC. His research interests are in Formal Methods, SNARKs, and Cryptographic Protocols.

Vivien Bammert

Vivien is a Ph.D. student at the University of Bern under the supervision of Professor Christian Cachin. She is mainly interested in distributed cryptography, security, coding theory and code-based cryptography.

Roi Bar-Zur

Roi Bar Zur is a graduate student at the Technion. He is interested in cryptocurrencies, game theory, and reinforcement learning.

Mariarosaria Barbaraci

Mariarosaria is a Ph.D. student at the University of Bern, supervised by Professor Christian Cachin. Her research interests explore distributed cryptography and its practical integration in real-world systems, with a specific emphasis on blockchain technology.

Carolin Beer

Carolin is a PhD student in the system security group at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Srdjan Capkun. Her research interests include decentralized systems and digital currencies, with a focus on user protection and privacy.

Samuel Breckenridge

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell University interested in security, privacy and cryptography.

Benjamin Y. Chan

Benjamin is a graduate student at Cornell University. His research interests span theoretical cryptography and the design of distributed protocols. Previously, he was an engineer at Algorand working on consensus.

Hao Chung

Hao Chung is a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is advised by Elaine Shi. He is broadly interested in cryptography, especially in the intersection between crypto and game theory.

Annalisa Cimatti

Annalisa is a PhD student at the University of Bern, supervised by Professor Christian Cachin. Her research focuses on distributed cryptography. She is also interested in elliptic curves cryptosystems.

Simone Colombo

Simone is a PhD student at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, under the supervision of Prof. Bryan Ford. His research focuses on cryptography, security and privacy.

Friederike Groschupp

Friederike is a PhD student at ETH Zurich. Her research interests include system security and blockchain technology.

Nerla Jean-Louis

Nerla is a Ph.D. student at University of Illinois Champaign Urbana. She received her undergraduate degree at Cornell University in 2017 in computer science and biological engineering. She then worked at IBM Research for two years until starting her Ph.D. She is interested in distributed systems and security research.

Mahimna Kelkar

Mahimna is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Cornell University where he is advised by Ari Juels. He is broadly interested in cryptography and security with some emphasis on blockchain protocols and applications.

David Lehnherr

David Lehnherr is a Ph.D student at the University of Bern, supervised by Professor Christian Cachin. He is interested in the formal epistemic foundations of secure distributed computing.

Yunqi Li

Yunqi Li is a PhD student at UIUC working with Andrew Miller. She is interested in system security, P2P network, and blockchain technology.

Xiaoyuan Liu

Xiaoyuan Liu is a Ph.D. student in the EECS department at UC Berkeley advised by Professor Dawn Song. Before joining UC Berkeley, he received his Bachelor's degree from ACM Honors Class, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is broadly interested in computer security, systems, and machine learning, especially building systems that enable secure and privacy-preserving data processing or solve real-world security problems.

Jun-You Liu

Jun-You is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at Cornell University. He is interested in the research of cryptography, crypto security, and crypto economics; looking forward to leveraging the discovery from research to build a safer open financial system.

Yanyi Liu

Yanyi is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at Cornell Tech. His interests are in cryptography and theoretical computer science in general, and recently his research focuses on Kolmogorov complexity and one-way functions. He is co-advised by Rafael Pass and Elaine Shi. He obtained his bachelor's degree in computer science at Tsinghua University.

Harjasleen Malvai

Harjasleen Malvai is a Ph.D. student with Prof. Andrew Miller at UIUC with research interests in theoretical and applied cryptography as well as their applications to blockchains, she also maintains an interest in run-on sentences.

Louis-Henri Merino

Louis-Henri is currently a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne. His research is in security and privacy, focusing on election security and open communication. As a Banneker Key Scholar, Louis-Henri graduated from the University of Maryland - College Park majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Cybersecurity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. After graduation, He received a Fulbright Scholarship to perform research on e-voting systems at EPFL.

Michael Mirkin

Michael Mirkin is a graduate student at the Technion. He's interested in distributed systems, cryptography, and P2P networks.

Shailesh Mishra

Shailesh is a PhD student at EPFL, where he is supervised by Prof. Bryan Ford. His research focuses on security and privacy.

Ujval Misra

Ujval is a PhD student at UC Berkeley working with Dawn Song. His research interests broadly lie in security, privacy and decentralized trust.

Marwa Mouallem

Marwa is a graduate student at the Technion working with professor Ittay Eyal. She is interested in cryptography and game theory.

Vivek Nair

Vivek Nair is an NSF CyberCorps Scholar, an NPSC Fellow, and a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley working with Dawn Song. He was the youngest-ever computer science degree recipient at the University of Illinois. His research interests are in authentication and applied cryptography.

Youer Pu

Youer is pursuing a Ph.D. degree at Cornell University under the supervision of prof. Lorenzo Alvisi.

Deevashwer Rathee

Deevashwer is a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley co-advised by Dawn Song and Raluca Ada Popa. His research interests broadly lie in applied cryptography and decentralized systems, and specifically in secure multi-party computation and zero-knowlegde proofs.

Silei Ren

Silei Ren is a computer science graduate student at Cornell University. He is interested in security, cryptography and programming language.

Qihong Ruan

Qihong Ruan is an Economics PhD student at Cornell University working on crypto, DeFi, and FinTech, advised by Prof. Maureen O'Hara and Lin William Cong. His research covers cryptocurrencies market microstructure, crypto derivatives trading, cryptocurrency investment of households, and DeFi trading platforms. Qihong is particularly excited about the intersection of AI and blockchain, the economic incentives in blockchain systems, and business applications of blockchains and Web3. His work has been presented at high-profile conferences such as the University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI) Connect Conference, FinTech, AI, and Big Data conference, the Northern Finance Association (NFA) Annual Meeting, and Tokenomics. Qihong's research aims to deepen understanding of cutting-edge blockchain technologies and their practical implementation in the financial sector.

Tianneng Shi

Tianneng Shi is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UC Berkeley advised by Prof. Dawn Song. He is broadly interested in computer systems, security, and decentralization.

Junxi Song

Junxi Song is a second-year Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Elaine Shi and Seth Goldstein. Her research interests broadly lie in Game Theory, Mechanism Design, and Applied Cryptography. She previously graduated from Cornell with a CS major.

Artem Streltsov

Artem is a Finance PhD student with a minor in Computer Science at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University and member of the DEFT Lab at Cornell University under the supervision of Prof. Will Cong. Before coming to Cornell, he studied economics and mathematics at Duke University. Artem’s research focuses on FinTech and applications of machine learning in finance and economics.

Florian Suri-Payer

Florian is a CS PhD student at Cornell University where he is advised by Lorenzo Alvisi. His primary research interest centers around Distributed Systems, in particular Byzantine Fault Tolerance and Databases. Other research interests broadly include Systems related ML.

Pasindu Tennage

Pasindu is a PhD student at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, under the supervision of Prof. Bryan Ford. Pasindu enjoys designing and building new distributed algorithms and performance tuning. Pasindu's research interests include consensus algorithms, resilient systems and performance optimization.

Julia Turcotti

Julia is a PhD student at Cornell University working with Andrew Myers to develop novel program analyses for safe and secure systems. Her work has targeted safe concurrency, nullability analysis at scale, and optimized deployment of runtime assertions.

Nikhil Vanjani

Nikhil Vanjani is a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is advised by prof. Elaine Shi. His research interests include cryptography and blockchains.

Daniel Vilardell

Dani is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at Cornell University working with prof. Ari Juels. Before joining Cornell University, he spent a year as a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley working with prof. Dawn Song on Zero Knowledge proofs. His interests include cryptography, zero knowledge proofs, blockchain and privacy.

Yu Wang

Yu Wang is a PhD student in the Economics department at Cornell University and an affiliate of the DEFT Lab. He studies macroeconomics and finance, with a focus on firm investment behavior and the non-fungible token market.

Zhun Wang

Zhun Wang is a Ph.D. student in the EECS department at UC Berkeley advised by Prof. Dawn Song. Before joining UC Berkeley, he obtained a bachelor's degree in Physics from Peking University and worked in VUL337 security group in Tsinghua University for about two years. He is interested in general computer security topics, especially in system security and blockchain security.

François-Xavier Wicht

François-Xavier Wicht is a first-year PhD student at the University of Bern under the supervision of Christian Cachin. His research interests lie mostly in privacy in cryptocurrencies and blockchains.

Zhe Ye

Zhe Ye is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UC Berkeley advised by prof. Dawn Song. His research interests include the scalability and security of decentralized systems.

Hongbo Zhang

Hongbo is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Cornell University advised by Robbert van Rennesse. He is interested in Computer Systems, currently focusing on storage systems and smart contract virtual machines for blockchain systems. He obtained his Bachelor's degree from the University of Waterloo.

Haoqian Zhang

Haoqian is a Ph.D. candidate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). His research interests lie in the general area of decentralized systems, particularly in blockchain, as well as their applications in cryptocurrency and smart contracts.

Luofeng Zhou

Luofeng is a PhD student in Finance at the New York University Stern School of Business and an external member of the Digital Economy and Financial Technology (DEFT) Research Lab. He is broadly interested in blockchain innovations and their economic implications, especially in the mechanism design of blockchain.

Mingxun Zhou

Mingxun Zhou is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include privacy-preserving algorithm design and the algorithmic foundation of blockchain. He is currently co-advised by Elaine Shi and Giulia Fanti. Before joining CMU, he received his bachelor's degree from Peking University.

Siyuan Zhuang

Siyuan Zhuang is a fourth-year PhD student at UC Berkeley Sky Computing Lab, co-advised by Prof. Dawn Song and Ion Stoica. His research focuses on machine learning systems, distributed systems and decentralized systems. In addition to his primary research interests, Siyuan has recently been actively involved in the development of Vicuna, an open-source chatbot impressing GPT-4 with 90% ChatGPT quality.

Visiting Scientists / Students

Hongyin Chen

Hongyin Chen is currently a Ph.D. student at Peking University, advised by Xiaotie Deng. He is currently a visiting Ph.D. student in Ittay Eyal’s group at Technion. His research interests include mechanism design and game theory in blockchain.

Steven Goldfeder

Steven Goldfeder is a scientist and co-founder of Offchain Labs. He holds a PhD from Princeton University and is a co-author of the leading textbook on cryptocurrencies.

Zhiheng He

Zhiheng He is a PhD student at Tsinghua University advised by Prof. Ke Tang, and a visiting graduate researcher and member of the DEFT Lab at Cornell University under the supervision of Prof. Will Cong. His research interests include blockchain-based ecosystems, fintech innovation, and digital assets.

Research Scientists

Dr. Vero Estrada-Galinanes

Vero Estrada-Galinanes is a well-established researcher scientist member of DEDIS lab at EPFL. She was formerly an Associate Professor and research deputy leader at the Resilient Systems lab at University of Stavanger, Norway. She gained international experience acquired in academic environments, in the industry, as well as, in the public sector. She got a PhD thesis from University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, and has been with the Storage Systems Research Center at UCSC, USA. She was the recipient of SNSF, MEXT (Monbukagakusho), and CONICET grants. Her research areas of interest are decentralized p2p systems, complex systems, distributed data structures, cryptoeconomics, and their cross-disciplinary applications to empower individuals, communities and societies.

Dr. Kari Kostiainen

Kari Kostiainen is Senior Scientist at ETH Zurich and Coordinator of Zurich Information Security Center (ZISC). Before joining ETH, Kari was a researcher at Nokia. He has a PhD in computer science from Aalto. Kari's research focuses on system security. Recent topics include smartphone security, trusted computing, secure user interaction, and blockchain security.

Research Advisors

Surya Bakshi

Surya completed his Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign working with Andrew Miller in the Decentralized Systems Lab. Currently, he joined Offchain Labs.

Lorenz Breidenbach

Lorenz is the Head of R&D at Chainlink Labs.

Patrick McCorry

Patrick McCorry is the CEO of PISA Research. He was an Assistant Professor at King's College London in Cryptocurrencies and Security Engineering. As well, he was a researcher at University College London, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Newcastle University. Many moons ago, he also worked at IBM UK on the CICS Portfolio which is used by most banks in the world. His research focuses on cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, applied cryptography, and decentralized systems.

Haaroon Yousaf

Haaroon received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Information Security Group at University College London (UCL) under the supervision of Professor Sarah Meiklejohn and Professor Jens Groth. Currently, he works in research at Pometry, a start-up he co-founded in 2021 with his colleague Ben Steer from Queen Mary. They focus on building a platform for distributed temporal graph analytics.

Jay Yu

Jay Yu is an IC3 Research Advisor, where his research interests center around Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and programmable cryptography. Jay studied Philosophy and Computer Science at Stanford University. As President of Stanford Blockchain Club, he served as a Uniswap DAO delegate and a Teaching Assistant for CS 352B/LAW 1078 - Blockchain Governance. He also works on research and investments at Pantera Capital.

Fellows

Ethan Cecchetti

Ethan Cecchetti is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a member of the MadS&P and madPL groups. Previously, he was a Post-Doc Associate in the Maryland Cybersecurity Center at the University of Maryland. My research uses programming languages and applied cryptographic techniques to design secure systems and build tools to ease their development and analysis.

Philipp Jovanovic

Philipp Jovanovic is an Associate Professor in Information Security at University College London. Philipp's interests broadly include applied cryptography, information security, and decentralized systems. His research mission is to develop, analyze, and deploy scalable, privacy-enhancing, decentralized trust technologies that serve the end users and help to promote anti-fragile ecosystems.

Charles Chao Kang

Charles Chao Kang is an assistant professor at HKU Business School, the University of Hong Kong. Before that he was a doctoral student in Management (accounting, finance) at Cornell University. His research interests include information intermediaries, financial reporting, corporate governance, and cryptocurrencies.

Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias

Lefteris is an Assistant Professor at IST Austria, before that he worked on the design of the Diem blockchains as part of Novi Facebook and got his PhD for EPFL. He is interested in increasing the digital trust of online information and processes, especially those that impact the physical world. He focuses on scalability of blockchains, being the first to introduce quorum-based permissionless blockchains (Byzcoin) and permissionless sharding protocols (OmniLedger) as well as structured Mempools (Narwhal). His work is the first to break the 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 transactions per second barriers. He is also interested in how to produce secure distributed randomness and setup private vaults that enable private data exchange over blockchains. For his work he has been awarded the IBM PhD Fellowship for 2018 and 2019, and the EPFL Thesis Distinction 2020.

Ahmed Kosba

Ahmed Kosba is an assistant professor at the Computer and Systems Engineering Department at the Faculty of Engineering at Alexandria University. His reseach interests are in the areas of applied cryptography and security, with a focus on verifiable computation, zero-knowledge proofs and blockchains.

Ian Miers

Ian Miers is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on solving real world security issues using cryptography. He is one of the cofounders of Zcash, a privacy preserving cryptocurrency based on his work on Zerocash. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wired, and The Economist. It has also been denounced in at least two op-eds.

Naomi (Ephraim) Sirkin

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Drexel University. My research interests are in the foundations of cryptography. In particular, I've recently been interested in interactive proof systems, program obfuscation, and cryptographic lower bounds. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2022, advised by Professor Rafael Pass. Previously, I received my B.S. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University.

Ni Trieu

Ni Trieu is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Arizona State University. Her research interests are in cryptography and security, with a specific focus on secure computation and its applications such as private set intersection, private database queries, and privacy-preserving machine learning.

Ekaterina Volkova

Ekaterina is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of Melbourne, Finance Department. Prior to joining the program in 2012, Ekaterina graduated from Moscow State University with MA in Mathematics and from New Economic School with MA in Economics.

Ke Wu

Ke Wu is an assistant professor in the Theory of Computation Lab of the EECS Department at the University of Michigan. She obtained her PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Elaine Shi. She is interested in the intersection of cryptography and game theory, as well as coding theory and related areas in theoretical computer science.

Fan Zhang

Fan Zhang is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Yale University. He is also a security researcher at Chainlink Labs. His research primarily focuses on security/privacy/scalability problems in decentralized systems, especially those enabled by blockchain protocols and trusted execution environments (TEEs).

Jiaheng Zhang

Jiaheng obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, where he was advised by prof. Dawn Song. He has joined the School of Computing at National University of Singapore (NUS) as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2023. He is broadly interested in computer security and cryptography, especially zero-knowledge proofs and applications on blockchain and machine learning models. Before coming to Berkeley, he received his B.Eng. degree in Computer Science from ACM Honors Class at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He was also an intern at Cornell, advised by Prof. Elaine Shi.

Alumni

Faculty

Emin Gün Sirer
Former IC3 Co-Director

Emin Gün Sirer is the CEO and co-founder of Ava Labs. His research interests span distributed systems, cryptocurrencies, and software infrastructure for large scale services.

Researchers

Linus Gasser

Linus is working with his team of engineers to interface between PhD-students from Bryan Ford’s lab and industry partners. He likes to work with semester students, too, and help them to understand the implication of decentralised, distributed systems, and how ECC fits into that picture. His long-term goal is to build software for scalable, self-organizing communities. The current effort is at Cothority.

Tyler Kell

Tyler Kell has joined Upshot One where he will be focusing on smart contracts related to NFT analytics and appraisal. In a previous life, Tyler was a penetration tester, and enjoys an extensive history of breaking security assumptions.

Postdocs

Iddo Bentov

Iddo Bentov is a postdoc at Cornell University, and author of a number of academic papers on cryptography and cryptocurrency. He has been involved in the Bitcoin space since mid-2011, and also works on succinct zero-knowledge proofs at SCIPR Lab.

Kasra Edalatnejad

Kasra is a post-doctoral researcher at the ENCRYPTO lab where he is working alongside Prof. Dr. Thomas Schneider. He earned my Ph.D. in the SPRING lab at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), advised by Prof. Carmela Troncoso. His research interests span the areas of privacy and security.

Cody Freitag

I just received my PhD in computer science at Cornell University (although technically at the Cornell Tech campus), advised by Rafael Pass. I am a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University with Daniel Wichs and Boston University with Ran Canetti, where I will be fortunately funded by a Khoury College Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship. My research primarily focuses on the theoretical foundations of cryptography. In particular, I'm interested in cryptographic proof systems and their applications in the decentralized setting of blockchains. I've also been interested in non-uniform models of security and differential privacy.

Joshua Gancher

Joshua Gancher is a post-doc at Carnegie Mellon University. His research is about using techniques from formal methods and program verification to certify cryptographic implementations and proofs.

Kai Mast

Kai Mast is postdoctoral scholar in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. His research focuses on Byzantine fault-tolerant systems and databases.

Haobin Ni

Haobin is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington Programming Language and Software Engineering (PLSE) group, advised by Zachary Tatlock. At PLSE, I actively work on language design, program analysis, and compiler optimization, among other PL and system research directions. I’m also leading the PLSE PL Reading Group (PLRG) this year (2024-2025). He earned my Ph.D. degree in May 2024 from Cornell University, co-advised by Greg Morrisett and Robbert van Renesse. His research focuses on the formal verification of distributed systems.

Kirill Nikitin

Kirill Nikitin is a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center working with Prof. Gamze Gürsoy on building solutions for privacy-preserving sharing and analysis of genomics data. Previously, I completed my PhD in Computer Science at EPFL, where I was advised by Prof. Bryan Ford, and worked as a postdoc with Prof. Vitaly Shmatikov at Cornell Tech. My research interests revolve around topics in Privacy, Genomics, Anonymity, and Computer and Network Security. My past projects include work on reducing metadata leakage in network communication and encrypted data, building robust systems for private information retrieval, improving the security of software-update systems, and scaling and securing smart contracts.

Isaac Sheff

Isaac Sheff is a Computer Science Post-Doc at MPI-SWS. His research is primarily in distributed systems, with emphasis on security and heterogeneous trust.

Sandra Siby

Sandra completed her Ph.D. at EPFL and has joined Imperial College London as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. She is interested in network security, web security, and privacy.

Students

Mustafa Al-Bassam

Mustafa completed his Ph.D. at the Information Security Research Group of the Department of Computer Science at University College London. He is CEO of Celestia Labs and Co-founder of Chainspace (acquired by Facebook). His research interests include the intersections of peer-to-peer systems, distributed ledgers and information security.

Enis Ceyhun Alp

Ceyhun completed his PhD program at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland under the supervision of Prof. Bryan Ford. His research interests are in distributed systems, smart contracts, and security.

Ignacio Amores-Sesar

Ignacio completed his Ph.D. at the University of Bern under the supervision of Christian Cachin. His research interests lie in the study of different consensus mechanisms with a special interest in their security.

Sarah Azouvi

Sarah is a research scientist at Protocol Labs, working in ConsensusLabs. Her interests lie at the intersection of Applied Cryptography, Distributed Systems, and Game Theory. During her Ph.D., she mostly worked on descentralized consensus protocols but also looked at other aspects of descentralized systems such as their governance.

Kushal Babel

Kushal Babel obtained his PhD from Cornell Tech, where he was advised by Ari Juels. He is currently working as a senior researcher at Monad Labs. Kushal has broad research interests and experience, ranging from Cryptoeconomics (MEV) and Consensus to smart contract security and cryptography. He is building novel financial instruments and highly performant and robust blockchain systems and applications.

Shehar Bano

Shehar Bano is a Research Scientist at Novi (Facebook) based in London. She is also a visiting researcher at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge. Shehar's research interests centre on networked and distributed systems, particularly in the context of security and performance. Her key areas of research include blockchains, information control (censorship & discrimination), internet measurement, and malware and intrusion detection.

Cristina Basescu

Cristina completed her Ph.D. at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, under the supervision of Prof. Bryan Ford. She enjoys designing and building fast, reliable systems. Her research interests include fault tolerance and scalability in distributed systems, network security, and consensus protocols.

Soumya Basu

Soumya Basu completed his Ph.D. program at Cornell CS under the supervision of Emin Gün Sirer. He is primarily looking at how to provide strong security guarantees in blockchain technology without sacrificing performance. He also spends some time looking at the financial incentives involved in decentralized cryptocurrencies. For more up to date information, please visit his website.

Matthew Burke

Matt completed his PhD at Cornell University under the supervision of prof. Lorenzo Alvisi. He has joined Datablocks as a Software Engineer working on the Caching Team.

Burcu Canakci

Burcu completed his graduate program at Cornell University working with Robbert van Renesse. Currently, he has joined Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Raymond Cheng

Raymond Cheng is a research scientist, entrepreneur, open source software developer, and adjunct professor, who is passionate about building technology that improves the lives and freedoms of internet users. He has made contributions in a wide range of areas in distributed systems and security, including data privacy, secure computing, blockchains, and scalable network systems.

Philip Daian

Philip Daian is a Computer Science graduate student at Cornell University. He brings experience in the formal verification and automotive domains, and looks forward to building the next generation of efficient and open financial cryptosystems.

Yael Doweck

Yael Doweck graduated from the Technion and was advised by Prof. Ittay Eyal. Currently, she works at StarkWare. She is interested in distributed systems, cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency exchanges.

Ayush Dubey

Ayush Dubey is a Software Engineer with TensorFlow, focusing on distributed runtime and performance. He completed his PhD in Computer Science in 2017 at Cornell University.

Nicolas Gailly

Nicolas was a software engineer before enrolling as a doctoral student at EPFL working in the decentralized systems group DEDIS. Upon completion of his Ph.D. program he has joined Protocol Labs as a Research Engineer. His research interests are decentralized systems & applied cryptography.

Adem Efe Gencer

Adem Efe Gencer received his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University. His research interests lie in the fields of Distributed Systems and Networking with a focus on improving the scalability of blockchain technologies.

Yue Guo

Yue Guo completed her PhD program at Cornell University, Computer Science Department under the supervision of prof. Elaine Shi. Currently, she works at JP Morgan Research. She is interested in cryptography and system security.

Charlie Hou

Charlie completed his Ph.D. at CMU advised by Giulia Fanti. He is a research scientist at Meta interested in robustness of data-driven systems.

Yan Ji

Yan Ji completed her PhD under the supervision of prof. Ari Juels at Cornell Tech. She is interested in blockchain technologies and other areas intersecting security, applied cryptography and distributed systems.

George Kappos

George completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at University College London working with Sarah Meiklejohn. He is researching privacy in cryptocurrencies and has joined Chainalysis.

Ariah Klages-Mundt

Ariah Klages-Mundt completed his Ph.D. in Applied Math at Cornell University and he is leading the R&D team at Gyroscope. His research is at the intersection of computer science and economics on the design of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and economic networks. He brings prior experience working in the financial technology sector.

Sishan Long

Sishan Long completed her program at Cornell University advised by prof. Ari Juels, and has joined Espresso Systems. She is interested in blockchain technologies.

Alex Manuskin

Alex is a researcher working at StarkWare. He is interested in distributed systems, scaling cryptocurrencies and security.

Krishna Deepak Maram

Deepak completed his Ph.D. degree at Cornell University working with Ari Juels and has since joined Mysten Labs.

Sinisa Matetic

Sinisa Matetic is a research scientist at ETH Zurich. He was born in Split, Croatia. Prior to joining ETH Zurich, he worked as a Management Consultant at A.T. Kearney in the SEE region. Sinisa's research interest are in system security focusing on distributed systems, trusted hardware, blockchain-based technology design and integrity protection.

Jovana (Mićić) Milojević

Jovana completed her Ph.D. at the University of Bern, supervised by Professor Christian Cachin. Her research interests are consensus protocols and the security of distributed systems.

Bineet Mishra

Bineet completed his Ph.D. in Economics at Cornell University. His main research interests are at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance. His current research agenda aims to understand the implications of new financial technologies, such as introduction of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), for monetary policy and financial stability. Additionally, he works on international capital flows, with special focus on the safe assets, to understand the effects of financial linkages and spillovers among the countries.

Amani Moin

Amani is PhD candidate in Economics with research in Corporate Finance and Financial Technology. She is also the Chief Cryptoeconomist at AVA Labs. Her research interests are in empirical corporate finance, machine learning, and cryptocurrencies.

Oded Naor

Oded obtained his Masters under the supervision of prof. Ittay Eyal. He has joined StarkWare working as a Product Manager & Blockchain Researcher. His research interests include blockchains, security, and distributed systems in general.

Gengmo Qi

Gengmo completed his Ph.D. program in Computer Science at Cornell University and has joined Drangonfly as a research partner. His interest broadly include security and privacy, distributed systems, and cryptoeconomics.

Sergi Delgado Segura

Sergi is a Bitcoin dev and researcher at Chaincode Labs. Also, he's the lead developer and maintainer of The Eye of Satoshi. My research interest lies on Bitcoin, networks and privacy.

Kevin Sekniqi

Kevin Sekniqi is COO at Ava Labs.

Weizhao Tang

Weizhao completed his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University supervised by Dr. Giulia Fanti. Prior to this he received his Master's degree (2021) from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a Research Scientist at Meta. His research interests are privacy and security of distributed systems, particularly cryptocurrency systems based on blockchain.

Itay Tsabary

Itay Tsabary completed his PhD at the Technion and was advised by Prof. Ittay Eyal. Currently, he works in research at StarkWare. He is interested in distributed systems, cryptocurrencies and game theory.

Karl Wüst

Karl completed his PhD in the System Security Group at ETH Zurich. Currently, he is a faculty member at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information. His main research interest is blockchain technology with a focus on security and privacy.

Lun Wang

Lun Wang obtained his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley advised by prof. Dawn Song. Currently, he has joined Google. His research interest is in the intersection of machine learning and security, data privacy, programming language, blockchains and applied cryptography.

Tiancheng Xie

I earned my Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley security group, under the guidance of Dawn Song. My BEng in Computer Science was obtained from the ACM Class at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. My research primarily revolves around cryptography and algorithms.

Siqiu Yao

Siqiu Yao has completed his PhD at Cornell University under the supervision of prof. Andrew Myers. He is interested in building blockchain systems and smart contract languages with better security.

Matan Yechieli

Matan completed his Master of Science program at the Technion under the supervision of prof. Ittay Eyal. His research interests include blockchain systems, security, and cryptocurrencies.

Maofan (Ted) Yin

Ted completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University, co-advised by Prof. Emin Gun Sirer and Prof. Robbert van Renesse. He's previously worked closely with Dr. Dahlia Malkhi. His research focuses on fundamental problems of fault-tolerance, consensus protocols, and peer-to-peer systems. He's currently tackling challenges in blockchains, from a system perspective.

Tom Yurek

Tom Yurek completed his Ph.D. at UIUC working with Andrew Miller. He is interested in Privacy and Applied Cryptography.

Yunhao Zhang

Yunhao Zhang completed his PhD at Cornell University under the supervision of prof. Lorenzo Alvisi. His research interest spans distributed systems, game theory, and mechanism design. He is a recipient of the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at OSDI'20 and the 2021 Facebook Fellowship.