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Directors
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 Distinguished Engineer at EMC (now Dell EMC), where he worked until 2013. His research 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 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 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 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 modeling. His lectures can be found in the first cryptocurrency textbook and MOOC.
Staff
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 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.
Oana’s role is essential for ensuring the smooth operation of IC3’s activities and supporting its leadership in advancing blockchain research and applications. She is responsible for planning, organizing, and providing logistical support for domestic and international IC3 events, including the Annual Blockchain Camp, Annual Winter Retreat, partner meetups, and various conferences, seminars, and symposiums.
Ashley is a former breaking news journalist and media relations expert. She has worked with several clients ranging from liquid staking protocols, academic researchers, and cryptocurrency exchanges. Before moving to New York, she was the director of communications for Ether Capital, the largest staking company in the capital markets. Ashley has a proven track record of building company brands and regularly secures earned media coverage for her clients by top-tier news organizations including Bloomberg and CNBC.
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 the Rudd Family Endowed Chair Professor of Management and Professor of Finance at Cornell University. He is also a Department editor at the Management Science, Research Associate at the NBER, Senior Fellow and Track Director at the ABFER, director of FinTech at Cornell Initiative, (co-)founder of multiple international research forums (e.g., ABFR and CBER), and was formerly a faculty member at the University of Chicago, Poets & Quants World Best Business School Professor, George P. Shultz Scholar, and Stanford Lieberman Fellow. He is a founding scholar of the fields of FinTech, Tokenomics, and AI for Social Sciences, and is among the most published and cited FinTech economists and finance theorists. He is the recipient of numerous awards including Circle Insight Prize and Exponential Science Award. He is also the senior economic advisor and a senior economist at Chainlink Labs and has advised leading FinTech firms, quant shops, venture 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.
Matt Weinberg
My primary research interest is in Algorithmic Mechanism Design – algorithm design in settings where users have their own incentives. Some examples of my Algorithmic Mechanism Design research pertaining to blockchains include strategic manipulation of consensus protocols, transaction fee mechanism design, and understanding the economic impact of decentralization on users.
Fan Zhang
Fan Zhang is an Assistant Professor at Yale CS. He works on computer security and applied cryptography, with a focus on real-world distributed and decentralized systems. Recently, he is passionate about blockchains systems and their applications (e.g., DeFi), digital identity, anonymity networks, etc. He runs the Decentralized Systems Group at Yale CS.
Executive-in-Residence
Neil DeSilva
IC3 Executive-in-Residence
Neil DeSilva is a global innovator in the digital asset industry, having built two multi-billion-dollar crypto businesses as CFO of PayPal Digital Currencies & Remittances and as Trading Unit CFO at Galaxy (TSX GLXY), a leading financial services platform in the blockchain sector. At PayPal (NASDAQ PYPL), Neil was a co-creator of PayPal’s stablecoin, PayPal USD, and scaled it to being available to 700 million users worldwide. Neil has played a key role in several of the industry’s leaps forward over the past half decade and has facilitated investments into dozens of Web3 startups.
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
Hongyin Chen
Hongyin Chen received his Ph.D. from Peking University and is currently a postdoc in Ittay Eyal’s group at the Technion. His work centers on mechanism design and game theory in blockchain.
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.
Aviv Yaish
Aviv likes breaking stuff, especially blockchains.
Mengqian Zhang is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University, working with Prof. Fan Zhang. Her research mainly focuses on blockchain, algorithmic game theory, and decentralized finance.
Students
Isabel Agadagba
Isabel Agadagba is a CMU Rales Fellow pursuing an MSIT in Privacy Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science with a double major in Film and Television, Animation from New York University. Her research focuses on usable security and privacy in the financial sector for underrepresented communities.
Muhammad Ahmed
Muhammad Ahmed is a first-year PhD student working with Lorenzo Alvisi. His research interests lie in distributed systems, with particular attention to designing efficient, scalable, and secure systems that address the varying constraints and tradeoffs across diverse application domains.
Kaya Ito Alpturer
I’m a PhD student at Princeton University advised by Prof. Matt Weinberg. My research interests are blockchains, algorithmic game theory, and consensus.
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.
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.
Widad Boulos
I’m a graduate student at the Technion, supervised by Professor Ittay Eyal. My research centers on authentication, and I’m also interested in cryptography and the security of blockchain systems.
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.
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.
Aadityan Ganesh
I am a PhD student in computer science at Princeton University, advised by Prof. Matt Weinberg. My research focuses on mechanism design and algorithmic game theory, with applications in blockchain, including transaction fee mechanism design and the economic impact of decentralization.
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.
Giannis Kaklamanis
Giannis is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Yale University, advised by Prof. Fan Zhang. His research focuses on cryptography for decentralized systems with privacy and transparency guarantees.
Daniel Lee
Daniel Lee is a researcher and systems enthusiast with a deep passion for distributed systems. His work explores how to design and reason about fault-tolerant protocols, especially under adversarial and asynchronous conditions. Through his research—including ongoing work with Professor Lorenzo Alvisi—he aims to better understand the theoretical and practical foundations of distributed computing. He’s particularly drawn to the challenges of building systems that are robust, efficient, and correct, even in the face of failure.
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.
Austin Li
Austin Li is a PhD student working with Lorenzo Alvisi. His research interests broadly include distributed systems, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, cloud computing, and the challenges in creating efficient, durable, consistent, and fault tolerant systems.
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.
Dor Malka
My name is Dor, and I’m a graduate student at the Technion, working with Professor Ittay Eyal. My interests include authentication, cryptography, and game theory.
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.
Shailesh Mishra
Shailesh is a PhD student at EPFL, where he is supervised by Prof. Bryan Ford. His research focuses on security and privacy.
Marwa Mouallem
Marwa is a graduate student at the Technion working with professor Ittay Eyal. She is interested in cryptography and game theory.
Michael Neuder
Mike is a PhD student at Princeton studying blockchain incentive design under the supervision of Professor Matt Weinberg. Prior to returning to school, he was a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation working on Proof-of-Stake and MEV protocol design questions.
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.
Aditya Saraf
Aditya is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at Cornell Tech, where he is advised by Rafael Pass and Joe Halpern. His research interests are in the intersection of economics and computer science, especially in relation to cryptocurrencies.
Yehuda Shani
Yehuda has BSc in Computer Science, and is pursuing a MSc in Electrical Engineering at Technion, researching optimal cryptocurrency wallet design.
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.
Takudzwa Tarutira
Takudzwa Talent Tarutira is an Information Security master’s student at Carnegie Mellon University who also holds a Master’s degree in Engineering Artificial Intelligence. His research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and cybersecurity, focusing on adversarial machine learning, security and privacy in machine learning, and the applications of AI in security. Outside of academia, he loves traveling and photography.
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.
Wenhao Wang
Wenhao Wang is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Yale University, advised by Prof. Fan Zhang. His research focuses on applied cryptography, mechanism design, and enhancing the scalability and privacy of blockchains.
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.
Sen Yang
Sen Yang is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, advised by Fan Zhang. His research focuses on identifying real-world security issues, particularly those caused by MEV, and addressing them through the design of secure, incentive-compatible decentralized systems.
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.
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.
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
Maryam Bahrani
Maryam is a mechanism design researcher at Ritual. She is interested in the economic aspects of blockchain protocols from consensus to applications. Previously, she was a researcher at a16z crypto, a quant trader at Jane Street, a grad student at Columbia working with Tim Roughgarden, and an undergraduate at Princeton working with Matt Weinberg.
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.
Kaihua Qin
Kaihua Qin is a researcher affiliated with Yale University, working with Prof. Fan Zhang and Prof. Zhong Shao. He earned his PhD from Imperial College London, advised by Prof. Arthur Gervais. Kaihua is also a co-founder of D23E. His research interests include blockchain security, DeFi, and AI.
Research Scientists
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
Joshua Gancher
Joshua Gancher has joined Northeastern University as an Assistant Professor after completing his post-doc at Carnegie Mellon University. His research is about using techniques from formal methods and program verification to certify cryptographic implementations and proofs.
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.
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.
Kai Mast
I am a Assistant Professor of Computer Science at San José State University. Before that I was a postdoc the University of Wisconsin in Madison working with with Andrea and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. I received my Ph.D. from Cornell University under the supervision of Gün Sirer. Even longer ago I was an undergraduate at University of Bamberg working with Udo Krieger.
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.
Jovana (Mićić) Milojević
I acquired a PhD in blockchain and consensus protocols, with a strong background in software engineering. My research journey started with a comprehensive security analysis of the Ripple consensus protocol and evolved into a deep dive into decentralized finance, with a specific focus on mitigating front-running attacks. The result of my dedicated work is the development and design of a new fairness protocol, complemented by a fully functional prototype implemented in the Go language.
Sandra Siby
Sandra Siby is an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi, where she leads the Haven Lab. Her research goal is to provide individuals with better control over their privacy and protection from digital threats. She wants to work towards a future where digital services are inherently designed with user privacy and security at the forefront. Her current areas of focus are security and privacy mechanisms for the web/IoT/other emerging technologies, and deployment of trusted and private machine learning on edge devices. Sandra obtained her Ph.D. (Computer Science) from EPFL, her M.S. (Electrical Engineering) from ETH Zurich, and her B.Eng (Electrical Engineering) from the National University of Singapore. Prior to NYUAD, she was a postdoctoral research associate at Imperial College London. She also spent a few years as a research engineer at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, and as a technology analyst at J.P. Morgan.
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.
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.
IC3 - The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts 