Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran

Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, holding tenure-track status. He previously served as a Senior Researcher at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik in Saarbrücken, Germany. He earned his Ph.D. from Duke University in the United States. His research focuses on enhancing the performance and security of networked systems, with contributions spanning blockchain technology, latency reduction, and optical data center networks.

Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University (USA), followed by postdoctoral research at Max-Planck-Institut. His academic journey emphasizes both theoretical and applied networking challenges.

Research Interests:

• Blockchain governance and transaction transparency
• Optimization of network congestion control (e.g., BBRv3)
• High-performance optical data center architectures
• Security implications of modern networking paradigms

Recent work explores frameworks like Lighthouse for optical testbeds and analyses of blockchain transaction fairness. His publications address both foundational network principles and applied solutions for real-world systems.

Teaching: Currently instructs courses on Network Security and Systems Seminar, integrating cutting-edge research into pedagogy.

Labs/Teams: Leads projects in optical data center networking and blockchain security through collaborative frameworks like DEMO and VOXEL.