ExpoLab Blockchain Speaker Series

Sadoghi's research spans all facets of secure and massive-scale data management. He leads the ExpoLab research group with the aim to pioneer a resilient data platform at scale, a distributed ledger centered around a democratic and decentralized computational model (Blockchain Textbook, ResilientDB Fabric, Journey, Outlook/Slides, Talk/Slides, Bitcoin Radio, Code, Hands-on, Wiki) that further aims to unify secure transactional and real-time analytical processing (Transaction Textbook, L-Store, QueCC). We envision ResilientDB to serve as a platform to foster "creativity". He has co-founded a blockchain company called Moka Blox, a spin-off of our ResilientDB Fabric.

Shreemoy Mishra is a researcher at IOV Labs. He is a former academic economist with a background in optimization and a PhD in game theory from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to IOVlabs he taught economics at universities in India and the United States. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

John is a third year Computer Science and Engineering student here at UC Davis. He has been the Head Instructor of Blockchain at Davis for over two years, developing blockchain workshops and curricula each quarter as well as pitching in for hackathons. John is passionate about breaking down the cutting-edge field of blockchain to anyone interested, regardless of their level of knowledge or education in the field.

Joe grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, receiving his Masters in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh. After gaining an interest in blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies in 2016, he moved to New York City and joined ConsenSys to work on Ethereum. Joe joined Blockstack as a Developer Evangelist in April 2020, looking to spread awareness of the technology and empower developers to build powerful decentralized applications. His favorite thing about the blockchain ecosystem is the passionate, thriving community full of eclectic, ambitious thinkers.

Alex Stokes works on scalability research and development at the Ethereum Foundation, primarily focused on ethereum 2.0. He is fascinated by the potential held by new cryptoeconomic mechanisms like Ethereum. When he is not working on scaling blockchains, he is immersed in DeFi learning about stablecoin algorithms and interest rate primitives.

Kevin is the Head of Training & Ecosystem Engineering at Truffle. He has over 15 years in software development working with companies across the industrial spectrum including Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, and MTV Networks. He’s also an experienced trainer & mentor, having created and delivered courses to developers around the globe. At Truffle he has helped some of the world’s largest enterprises up-skill their in-house development teams and explore the potential of decentralized technologies. He's also an active contributor to both Truffle's tooling and a wide number of popular open-source projects.

Preston Van Loon is a co-founder at Prysmatic Labs, focused on building critical infrastructure and tooling to scale Ethereum. Driven by the opportunity to make a positive global impact, Prysmatic Labs is dedicated to open source software to make Ethereum more accessible and easy to use on a global scale. As a former Googler, Preston brings an interesting perspective to scaling Ethereum 2.0 and beyond.

Dr. C. Mohan is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in China, and an Advisor of the Kerala Blockchain Academy (KBA) and the Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency (TNeGA) in India. He retired in June 2020 from being an IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center in Silicon Valley. He was an IBM researcher for 38.5 years in the database, blockchain and related areas, impacting numerous fields especially with his invention of the well-known ARIES family of database locking and recovery algorithms, and the Presumed Abort distributed commit protocol. This IBM, ACM, and IEEE Fellow has received the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award. Mohan was elected to the US and Indian National Academies of Engineering and named an IBM Master Inventor. This Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Madras (1977) received his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin (1981). He is an inventor of 50 patents. During the last many years, he focused on Blockchain, Big Data and HTAP technologies. Since 2017, he has been an evangelist of permissioned blockchains and the myth buster of permissionless blockchains. He has given talks in 43 countries.

Dr. Marko Vukolić is a Research Staff Member at Blockchain and Industry Platforms group at IBM Research - Zurich. Previously, he was a faculty at EURECOM and a visiting faculty at ETH Zurich. He received his PhD in distributed systems from EPFL in 2008 and his dipl. ing. degree in telecommunications from University of Belgrade in 2001. His research interests lie in the broad area of distributed systems, including blockchain and distributed ledgers, cloud computing security, distributed storage and fault-tolerance.

Xinying Yang (PhD), Professorate Senior Engineer (from 2016), got bachelor and doctor's degrees in Beihang University. He was DB2 for z/OS kernel developer, got IBM OTAA and 2 E&E awards, and appointed Chairman of IBM CDL Invention committee. He is founder and chief architect of Alibaba LedgerDB. His research area is database and blockchain. He also has hundreds of global issued patents, and won 2019 'China Corporate IP Elites Under 40' Award.

Peter Li is a member of the R3 Developer Relations team based out of New York City. Peter develops and maintains the developer community for Corda. His responsibilities include: contributing to open source projects to boost the developer experience, provide external training courses, and also contributing to Corda core feature enhancements. Prior to joining R3, Peter worked as a blockchain technologist at a Venture Capital firm on Wall Street. With his wide breadth of experience, Peter is eager to share his insights with developers looking to build blockchain applications and help to translate concepts into solutions.

Benedikt Bünz is a PhD student at Stanford working on the cryptography of cryptocurrencies. His area spans the work of zero-knowledge proofs, verifiable delay functions, accumulators and blockchain light clients. He is the author of Bulletproofs which is a zero-knowledge proof system that has been widely deployed in practice including for securing every Monero transaction.

Dan founded Radix after developing and selling IP now found in key mobile NFC payment technology. He also designed and co-built T-Mobile’s 1st mobile internet platform.

Cooper Kunz is a developer evangelist at Hedera Hashgraph, where he helps grow Hedera's strong technical community. Beyond decentralization, his interests include hiking, drinking excessive amounts of coffee, and trying to find the world's best sour beers. Prior to Hedera, Cooper studied philosophy and computer science at the University of Arizona. While there he also ran Hack Arizona, one of the most popular collegiate hackathons in the United States.

Peter DePaulo is a repeat founder and currently a core contributor as well as head of the developer community at NEAR. He's written code that's shipped to millions, worked on deep learning models applied to pharmaceutical oncology data, and drafted the non-fungible-token standard at NEAR protocol.

Preston Van Loon is a co-founder at Prysmatic Labs, focused on building critical infrastructure and tooling to scale Ethereum. Driven by the opportunity to make a positive global impact, Prysmatic Labs is dedicated to open source software to make Ethereum more accessible and easy to use on a global scale. As a former Googler, Preston brings an interesting perspective to scaling Ethereum 2.0 and beyond.

Alistair is lead researcher at Web3 Foundation mainly working on protocol design. Alistair is the architect behind GRANDPA, Polkadot’s novel finality gadget. Moreover, he has worked on the validator selection scheme NPoS and designed Polkadot’s availability and validity scheme.

Tal Rabin is a researcher whose general area focuses on cryptography and, more specifically, on secure multiparty computation, threshold cryptography, and proactive security. Her works have been instrumental in forming these areas. She is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Computer Science Dept and a consultant at the Algorand Foundation. Prior to joining UPenn she has been the head of research at the Algorand Foundation and prior to that she had been at IBM Research for 23 years as a Distinguished Research Staff Member. She has a PhD from the Hebrew University. Rabin is an ACM Fellow, an IACR Fellow and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the 2019 recipient of the RSA Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics. She was named by Forbes in 2018 as one of the Top 50 Women in Tech in the world. In 2014 Tal won the Anita Borg Women of Vision Award winner for Innovation and was ranked by Business Insider as the #4 on the 22 Most Powerful Women Engineers. Tal has served as the Program and General Chair of the leading cryptography conferences and is an editor of the Journal of Cryptology. She has served as a member of the SIGACT Executive Board and a council member of the Computing Community Consortium.

Fabrice is a researcher in cryptography at the Algorand Foundation. His interests range from theoretical topics to the implementation of secure multiparty computation protocols and their integration in blockchain systems. Prior to joining Algorand Foundation, Fabrice was a researcher at IBM Research. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France in 2016. He was awarded the “Prix de thèse Gilles Kahn 2017,” a French excellence award for Ph.D. theses in computer science, and an honorary mention at the ERCIM Cor Baayen Young Research Award 2017. He has received the best paper award at Eurocrypt 2018.

Aaron is the Founder and CEO of Govrn, a campaign finance platform that uses Outcome Based Donations to give constituents the power back and fix politics. Additionally he runs the San Francisco Decentralized Governance Meetup and the Decentralized Politics DAO. When he's not working on Govrn, you can find him in Lake Tahoe or reading The Federalist Papers.

Alex Masmej is a crypto founder building TBA. He issued his own currency, $ALEX, and was the first person to do a human IPO on Ethereum. Previously, he founded Rocket, a lending platform giving loans against NFTs, Marketing DAO, the first LLC DAO on Ethereum aimed at improving the blockchain’s marketing efforts, and is a core MetaCartel DAO member.

Yaz is Developer Relations at cLabs with a focus on Validator experience on Celo. Before Celo, he worked as Developer Relations Engineer for Ethereum Classic Cooperative. His background is in software engineering and robotics, and he is interested in all the latest cutting-edge research in STEM.

Kevin Owocki is the founder of Gitcoin.co -- An blockchain-based network for growing open source software with incentivization mechanics. He has a BS in Computer Science, 10 years of engineering leadership experience in startups and Open Source Software, and is a community organizer in the Boulder Colorado Tech Scene. Kevin believes strongly that Open Source Software Development should be sustainably funded. Gitcoin a one-stop shop that gives Software Developers the skills & connections to survive and thrive in this new blockchain ecosystem.

Sherwin serves as Portfolio Manager at Polychain Capital, where he manages liquid cryptocurrency investment strategy. Previously, he worked at Susquehanna International Group and Wedbush Securities on technology equity and equity derivatives research. He holds a bachelor's degree in Mathematics, Economics, and Finance from San Diego State University, where he published early quantitative research on Bitcoin and mined it from his dorm.

Travis Blane is a former engineer turned crypto, decentralized finance (DeFi) super user and marketer. He uses his background in understanding complex mechanisms to make sense of the new exciting world of decentralized finance. His goal is to educate others on how they can use these new p2p bankless money applications built on Ethereum. He educates folks first through his Twitter account, Youtube channel, and Zapper's daily DeFi livestream, and Yield TV.

Dahlia Malkhi is the Lead Maintainer of the Libra project and previously the Lead Researcher at Facebook/Novi. She has applied a foundational research interest in broad aspects of the reliability and security of distributed systems. For over two decades, she participated in driving innovation in tech, notably: co-inventor of HotStuff, co-founder and technical lead of VMware blockchain, co-inventor of Flexible Paxos, the technology behind Log Device, creator and tech lead of CorfuDB, a database-less database driving VMware’s NSX-T distributed control plane, and co-inventor of the FairPlay project. Dahlia joined Facebook/Novi in June 2019 as Research Lead. In 2014, she co-founded VMware Research and became a Principal Researcher at VMware until June 2019. From 2004-2014, she was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley. From 1999-2007, she served as a tenured Associate Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 1995-1999, she was a Senior Researcher at AT&T Labs, NJ.