Mahnush Movahedi

Mahnush Movahedi

Mahnush Movahedi, a former PhD student for Computer Science Professor Jared Saia, is part of a team at DFINITY, a startup based out of Switzerland and Palo Alto. According to its website, DFINITY, which is also a foundation, has “a very lofty goal to build what it calls the Internet Computer: a blockchain-based, decentralised and non-proprietary network to run the next generation of mega-applications.” Movahedi worked as a research assistant with Saia from 2012 to 2016 and graduated from the UNM Computer Science department in 2016.

Movahedi completed her PhD at UNM, where  her dissertation work was on distributed algorithms for multi-party computation, game theoretic secret sharing, and interactive communication over noisy channels.  While at UNM, she won a best paper award at the International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking (ICDCN) conference for a paper on scalable secure multiparty computation.

The Internet Computer, as described by founder and chief scientist Dominic Williams, “is a public infrastructure that aims to host the world’s next generation of software and services.”

Movahedi joined DFINITY as a senior researcher from Yale where she’s worked on scalable and fault-tolerant distributed algorithms for consensus and secure multi-party computation, secret sharing, and interactive communication over noisy channels.

Read the full story about the DFINITY project here.