معرفی
Dr. Alexander R. Block is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), specializing in Cryptography and Coding Theory. He focuses on the concrete security and space-efficiency of SNARKs, error-correcting codes, and locally decodable codes. Before UIC, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Georgetown University and University of Maryland, advised by Justin Thaler and Jonathan Katz. His PhD from Purdue University (2022) was supervised by Jeremiah Blocki.
His research bridges theoretical and applied aspects, including field-agnostic SNARKs (CRYPTO 2024) with expand-accumulate codes, Fiat-Shamir security analysis of FRI protocols (ASIACRYPT 2023), and memory-hard puzzles in the standard model (SCN 2022). He has contributed to insertion-deletion error codes (CCC 2023) and secure computation with leaky correlations (TCC 2018, CRYPTO 2017).
Dr. Block has received multiple scientific awards, including the Emil Stefanov Fellowship (2021) and Purdue Three Minute Thesis Competition Finalist (2022). His teaching includes courses like UIC's CS 505 - Computability and Complexity Theory (Spring 2025), where he emphasizes interactive proofs and zero-knowledge systems. He actively serves on program committees for CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT, and ZKProof Workshop, and has reviewed for leading journals and conferences.
