Derek Leung

I’m currently a Ph.D. student at MIT CSAIL, advised by Nickolai Zeldovich.

I graduated from Berkeley in 2016 with a B.A. in Computer Science and Math. I received a M.S. in EECS from MIT in 2018. From 2018 to 2020, I was a software engineer and manager at the cryptocurrency startup Algorand.

At Berkeley, I was a teaching assistant under Joseph Hellerstein for his Databases course in Spring 2015 and Spring 2016. I worked as a research assistant for David Wagner.

My research interests are in distributed systems and concurrency broadly and in consensus protocols and formal verification specifically. I’ve done some previous work in applied cryptography, in metadata privacy, and in usable security.