Nickolai Zeldovich

Nickolai Zeldovich is the Joan and Irwin M. (1957) Jacobs Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research focuses on building practical secure systems through the integration of formal methods with real-world system design.

His research interests span secure systems, operating systems, distributed systems, formal verification, and cryptography. Recent work emphasizes automated reasoning for distributed system liveness, leakage-free hardware security modules, and privacy-preserving web technologies. Projects include CryptDB (encrypted databases), FSCQ (verified file systems), Algorand (cryptocurrency), and Vuvuzela (private messaging).

His publication trends show consistent output in formal verification of distributed systems (Shipwright, Grove), hardware security (K2 Architecture), and privacy technologies (Tiptoe). Recent work increasingly combines theoretical verification with practical implementation constraints.

• Best Paper Awards at ACM SOSP (2013, 2015, 2017)
• Sloan Research Fellowship (2010)
• NSF CAREER Award (2011)
• MIT EECS Jamieson Award for Excellence in Teaching (2024)
• ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award (2017)
• Amazon Research Award (2023)

He advises PhD students through the PDOS research group with active grants from Amazon, Google, NSF, and DARPA. His teaching includes core courses like Computer Systems Security and Operating System Engineering, emphasizing hands-on security analysis. The PDOS lab maintains strong industry connections with multiple startup spin-offs and regular technology transfer to production systems.

He leads the PDOS (Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems) Research Group, which focuses on building verified, secure, and high-performance systems through close collaboration between theory and practice.