Ethan Olesinski is currently a Master’s of Computer Science student at Northeastern University focusing on software systems. Before graduate school, he received his Bachelor’s of Science in Economics and a minor in Mathematics from the University of Nevada. Previously, Ethan was an intern on the Applied Fintech Research team at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston where he worked on various projects related to Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). At DCI, his work will focus on software engineering for openCBDC and research assistance with other centralized digital asset projects.

Ayesha is an MEng student at MIT in the EECS department. Previously, she did her undergrad at MIT in Computer Science (6-3) and Economics (14-1). She is working on scaling privacy-preserving payments for OpenCBDC. Previously, she worked with the City Science group and has interned at Duolingo and Instabase as a software engineer. In her free time, Ayesha likes watching movies and TV shows, especially sitcoms, and hanging out with friends, and she is closely involved with the MIT Muslim Students Association.

Claire is a Master's of Engineering student at MIT this year after completing her MIT undergrad in Computer Science(6-3) in 3 years. She is currently an MEng research assistant with the MIT DCI after previously doing multiple semesters of undergrad research at the DCI where she had worked on the utreexo project. Her current research aims to improve blockchain security by modeling and investigating blockchain mining behavior in an effort to mitigate undercutting attacks. Outside of her research, she has done multiple internships at various fintech and trading companies, including Stripe and Jump Trading. In her free time, she loves to stay active by going on runs, dancing, and playing sports like soccer, volleyball and tennis.

Willie is a Ph.D. candidate in CSAIL at MIT, working on AI and Robotics with Leslie Kaelbling and Tomas Lozano Perez. Before then, he had roles working on Multi-Modality ML Model Competitions at NIST, Perception at Google, and Planning at Boston Dynamics AI Institute. He has also contributed to the launch of the wrapping protocol between Bitcoin and Cardano, and more recently, inspired by time in the MIT Bitcoin Club, he's delving deeper into blockchain research. His current side projects focus on multi-resource blockchain consensus, aiming to validate inference and train AI models in decentralized networks, and on maintenance of DCI’s Central Bank Digital Currency.

Hannah Shen holds an MBA from MIT Sloan focusing on data analytics. At DCI, she served as the Strategic Partnerships and Research Associate. Hannah was the Co-director of MIT Bitcoin Expo ‘23 and the Co-President of Sloan Blockchain Club. She was a founding member of Next.ID, a decentralized-identity protocol connecting identities across Web2 and Web3. Prior to Sloan, as an early-hire in business and product teams, she grew two media-tech startups in Silicon Valley from zero to one with successful further fundraise /exit. In her spare time, she enjoys comedy, painting, and camping.

Gabriela Torres joined the DCI as a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Product Manager for the collaboration with Bank of England (BoE). She is a second-year master's Engineering and Management student at the MIT School of Engineering & Sloan School of Management. She has been developing a start-up project to tackle problems of mental healthcare this past summer.

Prior to MIT, she worked at the main Peruvian Bank as an Innovation and Digital Transformation lead, having developed projects in the fields of finance, risk management, efficiency, customer experience, and company culture. Before that, she worked as a Financial Analyst and founded an entrepreneurship in education. She completed her Bachelors in Economics and Finance at Universidad de Piura, one of the top Peruvian Universities.

Alistair Hughes was working with the DCI as a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Product Manager. He was the lead Product Manager for the collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (FRBB) and the DCI which concluded in 2023. Alistair graduated from the Harvard Business School with an MBA in summer 2023.

Before grad school, Alistair has 5 years experience in fintech in Asia, most recently working as a product manager for a start-up neobank in Hong Kong. Between his first and second years at HBS he worked at Google in their payments team. Alistair has a Bachelor’s degree from the London School of Economics and a Master’s degree from Yale University.

Alistair is a Product Strategist at Google Payments where he works on processing strategy for Google’s global merchant businesses (Play/Add/Cloud etc.). Alistair remains focused on long-term disruption in the payments space including the emergence of CBDC and other digital currency solutions in mainstream financial transactions.

Andy Wong worked with the DCI as a Product Manager in 2022-23. He worked closely with researchers, engineers, and collaborators to co-develop the DCI outreach strategy and to help organize the OpenCBDC Workshop. Andy completed his MBA degree from MIT Sloan School of Management and continued his career at Amazon as a Technical Product Manager.

Prior to MIT, he worked at a fintech startup focusing on financial inclusion and electronic trading, while leading the business expansion in Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Taiwan. Before that, Andy worked at J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley as an equity trader. He graduated from University College London with a BSc in Mathematics with Economics.

Lillie Huang worked with the DCI as a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) product manager for the collaboration with the Central Banks and for OpenCBDC. Lillie also obtained her MBA from MIT Sloan. During her MBA, she interned at Bank of America and a VC focusing on FinTech and InsurTech investments.

Prior to MIT, she worked for 3 years across Africa as a product manager for various startups, multi-nationals, and research institutes that focus on increasing financial inclusion. Before that, she was a consultant based in Atlanta, tackling problems to improve the capital efficiency of multi-billion hospital systems across the US. She completed her Bachelors in Business at Emory University.

Nikhil George is working with the DCI as a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Product Manager for the collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (FRBB). Nikhil is a dual degree Master's student at MIT Sloan and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He has worked as a product manager at a Series-A healthcare AI company and Google on their search team.

Before grad school, Nikhil was a consultant at McKinsey & Company, working with governments and private sector clients in the US, Australia, Kenya, and Zambia on issues of economic development, financial inclusion, electricity access, and education. He completed his Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Shwetark graduated from MIT with an undergraduate double major in Computer Science and Mathematical Economics and a graduate MEng degree with the DCI. At the DCI, his primary graduate work focused on Transformable Discreet Log Contracts. Some of his other computer-science-related interests include cybersecurity and pure algorithms. In his free time, he likes reading and playing chess.

Tommy worked with the DCI as a product manager on the OpenCBDC working groups. He graduated with an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management in Spring 2022 and is working as a Technical Product Manager at Amazon.

Prior to business school, Tommy worked at Facebook, focused on preventing user data misuse by external developers and addressing the fallout of Cambridge Analytica. Before that, he worked on optimizing an auto refinance product in a P2P lending company, and has experience as an economic consultant in which he worked on cases ranging from investigating front-running in FX trading, to modeling valuation disputes and estimating damages in securities class action lawsuits. He completed his Bachelors in Business Administration at UC Berkeley.

Dave Urness worked with the DCI as a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) product manager for the collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (FRBB). In Spring 2021, he graduated with an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and worked as a product manager at Google this past summer.

Prior to MIT, he was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company, helping clients in the financial services, high tech, and telecommunication industries implement and build strategies around emerging technologies. He completed his electrical & computer engineering undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, where he focused on distributed computing and was on the varsity rowing team.

Claire graduated with an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management with a certificate in Data Analytics. Prior to Sloan, Claire was working in software. She spent 4 years implementing, supporting, and developing healthcare software, and then 2 years as an Operations Manager at a network management software company. This past summer, she interned at Nike on their Analytics team. Claire was the Teaching Assistant and Working Groups Project Manager for the 2020-2021 cycle.

James started mining Bitcoin in 2013 and was captured by the prospect of a trustless, permissionless financial system. Since starting at the DCI many years ago, James worked primarily on Cryptokernel; a distributed ledger development toolkit, as well as Lightning Network related projects. James also worked on a Proof-of-Work security project studying the safety of various cryptocurrencies from 51% attacks.

Jeremy is a researcher focused on understanding the ways that digital fiat currencies can be represented in a new model of the economy. After working at the Federal Reserve, his specific aim is to understand the roles that governments and central banks can play in fundamentally reinventing the structure of the financial system via blockchain solutions. Jeremy is pursuing a dual-degree MBA/MPA from MIT Sloan and the Harvard Kennedy School.

Kenny is an entrepreneur that has started, advised, and invested in startups for over seven years. His initial business exposure in the cryptocurrency space was an advisory role for a Bitcoin options trading platform in 2014. He is a frequent writer on blockchain topics and operates a fund. He is the teaching assistant for Blockchain Lab at MIT Sloan.

Océane is a master’s student at the MIT Media Lab in Responsive Environments. She was the teaching assistant for Blockchain Ethics Fall 2019.

Eilon Shalev the founder and CEO of elphi and was a 2019 MBA graduate from MIT Sloan. He led the DCI Working Groups in 2018-2019 and continues to help us with this program. Prior to MIT Sloan, Eilon served his country for 12.5 years. He wrote a novel at the age of 23 and was the first-ever Israeli to crowdfund a project in Israel, financing the publishing of his book.

Mark Weber leads the b_verify project for verifiable claims, focused on securing warehouse receipts records on public blockchains to improving agricultural finance. Mark also managed DCI's student working groups. Follow @markrweber on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Github.

Henry Aspegren is currently a Schwarzman Scholar studying technology policy and management at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Previously Henry was an undergraduate and graduate researcher at the DCI. He completed a Master’s thesis entitled “b_verify: Scalable Non-Equivocation for Verifiable Management of Data” with the group and was advised by the DCI Director Neha Narula. Henry is interested in using cryptography and data-driven decision making to make finance fairer and more inclusive.

Willy completed his MIT masters thesis entitled "Auditable Private Ledgers" with the DCI, which provides a design and implementation of a privacy solution for distributed ledgers that lets third parties audit private ledger data. He is currently a PhD student at UT Austin continuing to work on provably secure cryptosystems. Follow @elwrv on Twitter.

Jesus Mathus attained a Master's of Engineering in Computer Science, and completed his thesis work on Lightning Network under Tadge Dryja's supervision.

Nicola Greco was a Ph.D. student in the Decentralized Information Group at MIT. He writes and advances research on ways to re-decentralize the web, focusing on technical, political, and social aspects of decentralized systems both at MIT and the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society.