Research | Chainlink Labs

Research team

Lorenz Breidenbach

Lorenz Breidenbach is the head of R&D at Chainlink Labs. He is a security researcher and former BRIDGE fellow from ETH Zürich and IC3. He previously conducted research at Cornell Tech and spent time in industry at Google and Open Systems.

Ari Juels

Ari Juels is chief scientist at Chainlink Labs. He is the Weill Family Foundation and Joan and Sanford I. Weill Professor in the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and a computer science faculty member at Cornell University. He is a co-director of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3). He was previously chief scientist of RSA.

Dahlia Malkhi

Dahlia Malkhi is a distinguished scientist at Chainlink Labs. She has been the CTO at the Diem Association, lead researcher at Novi, co-founder of VMware Research, principal partner researcher at Microsoft Research, and a tenured professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has co-invented numerous innovations, including HotStuff, CorfuDB, Flexible Paxos, and Vertical Paxos, and has more than two decades of research experience in industry and academia, having led applied and foundational research focused on the reliability and security of distributed systems.

Dan Boneh

Dr. Boneh is a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University where he heads the applied cryptography group and co-directs the Center for Blockchain Research. Dr. Boneh's research focuses on applications of cryptography to blockchains and to computer security. He is the author of over 200 publications in the field, and is a recipient of the 2014 ACM prize and the 2013 Godel prize. In 2016 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Christian Cachin

Christian Cachin is a professor of computer science at the University of Bern, where he has led the Cryptology and Data Security Research Group since 2019. He worked for IBM Research for more than 20 years. He is an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, recipient of multiple IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards, and has also served as the president of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) from 2014-2019.

Christian Catalini

Christian is the co-creator of Diem and chief economist of the Diem Association. He founded MIT’s Cryptoeconomics Lab and regularly presents his work at leading institutions such as the Federal Reserve Bank, the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Fund, and more.

Farinaz Koushanfar

Farinaz Koushanfar is the Henry Booker scholar professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California San Diego, where she is the founding co-director of UCSD MICS (Center for Machine Intelligence, Computing, and Security). Her research is focused on automated holistic cross-layer co-design and optimization of Learning Algorithms, Security, and Privacy-Preserving Computing / Secure Multi-Party Computation.

Andrew Miller

Andrew Miller is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he leads the Decentralized Systems Lab and carries out research in applied cryptography, smart contract programming languages, and other topics in blockchains and computer security.

Mike Reiter

Michael Reiter is a James B. Duke distinguished professor in the departments of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering at Duke University. He has been recognized as a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE and received the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award for his research contributions in computer security and fault-tolerant distributed computing.

Xiao Wang

Xiao Wang is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University. His research interests include computer security, privacy and cryptography. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and his B.E. in C.S. from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Ted Yin

Ted focused on fundamental problems of fault-tolerance, consensus protocols, and storage systems during his Ph.D. at Cornell University. He co-developed the HotStuff protocol, variants of which have been adopted by a wide spectrum of projects; co-invented the Snow/Avalanche protocol that led to a public blockchain deployed among thousands of nodes worldwide; and co-founded the token-listed startup Ava Labs. His research is currently focused on building systems that are provably correct and practically effective.

Fan Zhang

Fan Zhang is a researcher working on blockchains, trusted hardware and applied cryptography. He created Town Crier and DECO as part of his PhD at Cornell. He is an incoming assistant professor at Duke University.

Alex Coventry

Alex Coventry is working on improvements to Chainlink's reporting protocol which will allow orders-of-magnitude reductions in the costs of running smart contracts that faithfully respond to real-world outcomes. He has a PhD in Applied Mathematics from MIT, and has been following cryptocurrency since the Bitcoin whitepaper came out in 2009.

Siam Hussain

Siam Hussain is a researcher in the field of privacy. He has a PhD in Computer Engineering from UCSD. His primary research focus is enabling data-intensive systems with provable privacy guarantees in practical settings. He has developed several open-source frameworks for secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) as well as a number of MPC-based applications.

Kostis Karantias

Kostis Karantias is a software engineer and researcher in the cryptocurrency space with a Masters of Engineering in Computer Science from the University of Ioannina. He previously conducted research and development on cross-chain interoperability, light clients, and innovative consensus algorithms. Before working on blockchains, he worked at Bloomberg as a software engineer.

Chrysa Stathakopoulou

Chrysa Stathakopoulou is a distributed systems researcher, passionate about decentralizing computation and trust with highly performant systems. Prior to joining Chainlink Labs, she worked at the blockchain group in IBM research focusing on consensus protocols. She is a PhD candidate at ETH Zurich and holds an ECE MSc from ETH Zurich.

Paweł Szałachowski

Paweł Szałachowski is an engineer and researcher interested in blockchains, network security, and applied cryptography. Prior to joining Chainlink Labs he worked at Google and in academia. He holds a PhD from Warsaw University of Technology.

Alexandru Topliceanu

Alexandru Topliceanu is a research engineer interested in distributed systems and the intersection of rigorous engineering and applied research. Alexandru holds an MSc from the University "Politehnica" Bucharest and previously worked as a platform engineer building infrastructure for the real-time web.

Xueyuan Zhao

Xueyuan Zhao is an engineer and researcher interested in blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Prior to joining Chainlink Labs, he conducted research at Cornell and Carnegie Mellon and worked at Jane Street. He obtained his Master of Science in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and B.S. in Computer Science from the ACM Honored Class, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

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Academic partners

Giulia Fanti

Giulia Fanti is an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests span the algorithmic foundations of blockchains, distributed systems, privacy-preserving technologies, and machine learning. She obtained her PhD in EECS from U.C. Berkeley and her B.S. in ECE from Olin College of Engineering.

Alumni

Dan Moroz

Daniel Moroz is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Harvard University where he works on algorithmic game theory in cryptocurrency systems and helped found Harvard's first cryptocurrency research group. He is affiliated with the MIT Digital Currency Initiative and previously worked at Google and in quantitative trading.

Wanyi Dai Li

Wanyi Dai Li was an economics researcher at Chainlink Labs. She holds a PhD in operations research from Stanford University where she studied market design and mechanism design. She was previously an economist at Novi supporting the Diem project and co-led the Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG) academic initiative.

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