Dahlia MalkhiView profile
Professor
Professor Dahlia Malkhi is a leading academic and researcher in distributed systems and blockchain technology. She currently holds a faculty position at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she heads the Foundations of Financial Technology (FfTech) research lab. Her work focuses on reliability, security, and consensus mechanisms in distributed systems, with a recent emphasis on blockchain innovations like HotStuff, which underpins Diem, Aptos, and other blockchains. She has held influential roles at industry leaders such as Chainlink Labs, Diem Association, VMware, and Microsoft Research. Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Past roles include CTO of Diem Association (2019–2022), Principal Researcher at VMware (2014–2019), and Partner Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research (2004–2014). Research Interests: Blockchain consensus algorithms (e.g., HotStuff, Flexible Paxos), Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), secure multi-party computation (FairPlay), and distributed database systems (CorfuDB). Her work bridges academic theory with industrial applications, emphasizing practical scalability and security. Awards: ACM Fellow (2011), IEEE TCDP Outstanding Technical Achievement Award (2021), IBM Faculty Award (2003/2004). She has also held leadership roles in conferences like Usenix ATC and program chairs for multiple distributed systems events. Advising & Grants: Advises projects at Space Computer, Lyquor Labs, and Chainlink Labs. Her research labs and collaborations include work on BBCA-Chain, Lumiere, and BFTBrain, advancing consensus mechanisms in decentralized systems. Labs/Teams: Leads UCSB’s FfTech lab, co-founded VMware Research, and contributed to foundational blockchain projects like DiemBFT and Espresso Systems. Her work impacts technologies such as NSX-T control planes and distributed financial infrastructure.








