I am CEO and co-fouonder of Cysic. Before that, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University. Previously, I was a researcher at Algorand. Before that, I was a postdoctoral researcher at University of Maryland, hosted by Prof. Jonathan Katz and Prof. Xiaodi Wu. I obtained my Ph.D. at Cornell University advised by Prof. Elaine Shi. I am interested in various aspects of cryptography and its intersections with formal verification and hardware acceleration.

Impact of my research: At Cysic, I’ve led the development of high-performance hardware solutions to accelerate zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) generation. We’ve built a complete end-to-end solution leveraging off-the-shelf GPUs, which has already been adopted in real-world deployments. For instance, it is used in major decentralized exchanges (DEXs), where it enables real-time proof generation for transaction clearance, thus bringing transparency and reassurance to users as they trade with the chain. To further support the ecosystem, we also launched a public-good initiative offering real-time ZK proving for Ethereum, powered by our accelerated hardware. In all these cases, the performance gains from our infrastructure have been crucial. In parallel, I’ve contributed to the architecture of a specialized ASIC chip, which is designed to significantly outperform traditional GPU clusters in both speed and energy efficiency. Additionally, I spearheaded the prestigious ZPrize competition, which awarded over $1 million in prizes to advance end-to-end hardware acceleration for ZKPs, catalyzing innovation across the cryptographic hardware ecosystem.

Teaching

• Fall 2022: CS 671: Topics in Lattice-Based Cryptography.
• Spring 2023: CS 419: Computer Security.
• Fall 2023: CS 546: Computer System Security.

Publications

Professional Activities