# Mentorship · Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias

## PhD and postdoctoral advising

### Pasindu Tennage

PhD co-advisee · EPFL · 2019–2025. Visiting researcher at IST Austria, 2022.

- [Mahi-Mahi: Low-Latency Asynchronous BFT DAG-Based Consensus](https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08670), ICDCS 2025.
- [RACS-SADL: Robust and Understandable Randomized Consensus in the Cloud](https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04183), CLOUD 2025.
- [QuePaxa: Escaping the Tyranny of Timeouts in Consensus](https://bford.info/pub/os/quepaxa/quepaxa.pdf), SOSP 2023.

### Ray Neiheiser

Postdoctoral advisee · IST Austria.

- [Anthemius: Efficient & Modular Block Assembly for Concurrent Execution](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10074), FC 2025.
- [CHIRON: Accelerating Node Synchronization without Security Trade-offs in Distributed Ledgers](https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.14278), Preprint 2024.
- [CoBRA: A Universal Strategyproof Confirmation Protocol for Quorum-based Proof-of-Stake Blockchains](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16783), Preprint 2025.

## Master’s thesis advising

### Ioannis (Giannis) Alexopoulos

Master’s thesis advisee.

- [CHIRON: Accelerating Node Synchronization without Security Trade-offs in Distributed Ledgers](https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.14278), Preprint 2024.

### Antoine Desjardins

Master’s thesis advisee.

- [RACS-SADL: Robust and Understandable Randomized Consensus in the Cloud](https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04183), CLOUD 2025.
- [Divide and Scale: Formalization of Distributed Ledger Sharding Protocols](https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.10434), SIROCCO 2023.

### Christos Stefo

Master’s thesis advisee.

- [Executing and Proving over Dirty Ledgers](https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1554.pdf), FC 2023.
- [CoBRA: A Universal Strategyproof Confirmation Protocol for Quorum-based Proof-of-Stake Blockchains](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16783), Preprint 2025.

### Arman Babaei

Master’s thesis advisee.

- [CHIRON: Accelerating Node Synchronization without Security Trade-offs in Distributed Ledgers](https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.14278), Preprint 2024.

## Mysten Labs · Research internships

### Zhengqing (Scofield) Liu

Research intern · 2024.

- [Remora: Scale-out Deterministic Execution for Smart Contracts](https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02817), VLDB 2026.

### Giorgos Tsimos

Research intern · 2023.

- [HammerHead: Leader Reputation for Dynamic Scheduling](https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12713), ICDCS 2024.
- [BlueBottle: Fast and Robust Blockchains through Subsystem Specialization](https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15361), Preprint 2025.

### Fatima Elsheimy

Research intern · 2026.

- Shared research (private).


### Dakai Kang

Research intern · 2025.

- Shared research (private).


### Jianting Zhang

Research intern · 2025.

- [Masking Ordering Failures in BFT SMR via DAG-based Proactive Pre-Commit Execution](https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/796), Preprint 2026.
- [Beluga: Block Synchronization for BFT Consensus Protocols](https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15517), Preprint 2025.

### Giulia Scaffino

Research intern · 2024.

- [Sunfish: Reading Ledgers with Sparse Nodes](https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1680), SBC 2026.

### Srivatsan Sridhar

Research intern · 2024.

- [Stingray: Fast Concurrent Transactions Without Consensus](https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06531), Preprint 2025.

### Kushal Babel

Research intern · 2023.

- [Mysticeti: Reaching the Limits of Latency with Uncertified DAGs](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.14821), NDSS 2025.

### Quentin Kniep

Research intern · 2023.

- [Pilotfish: Distributed Execution for Scalable Blockchains](https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.16292), FC 2025.

### Nuda (Tony) Zhang

Research intern · 2023.

- [Pilotfish: Distributed Execution for Scalable Blockchains](https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.16292), FC 2025.

### Christoph Günther

Research intern · 2026. PhD rotation student · IST Austria.

- [Practical Asynchronous Proactive Secret Sharing and Key Refresh](https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1586), Preprint 2022.

## Facebook / Meta · Research internships

### Neil Giridharan

Research intern · 2022.

- [Bullshark: DAG BFT Protocols Made Practical](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.05677), CCS 2022.

### Guy Goren

Research intern · 2022.

- [Proof of Availability & Retrieval in a Modular Blockchain Architecture](https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/455.pdf), FC 2023.

### Shir Cohen

Research intern · 2021, 2022.

- [Proof of Availability & Retrieval in a Modular Blockchain Architecture](https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/455.pdf), FC 2023.
- [Be Aware of Your Leaders](https://sonnino.com/papers/leader-reputation.pdf), FC 2022.

### Zhuolun Xiang

Research intern.

- [Practical Asynchronous High-threshold Distributed Key Generation and Distributed Polynomial Sampling](https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1389.pdf), USENIX Security 2023.
- [Executing and Proving over Dirty Ledgers](https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1554.pdf), FC 2023.
- [Practical Asynchronous Distributed Key Generation](https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1591), IEEE S&P 2022.
- [Jolteon and Ditto: Network-Adaptive Efficient Consensus with Asynchronous Fallback](https://sonnino.com/papers/jolteon-and-ditto.pdf), FC 2022.
- [Brief Announcement: Be Prepared When Network Goes Bad: An Asynchronous View-Change Protocol](https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.03181), PODC 2021.

### Harjasleen (Jasleen) Malvai

Research intern.

- [Parakeet: Practical Key Transparency for End-to-End Encrypted Messaging](https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/081.pdf), NDSS 2023.

### Oded Naor

Research intern.

- [All You Need is DAG](https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.08325), PODC 2021.

## Research mentorship

### Junchao Chen

Research mentee · UC Davis.

- [Thunderbolt: Concurrent Smart Contract Execution with Nonblocking Reconfiguration for Sharded DAGs](https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.09409), EDBT 2026.
- [Securing Consensus from Long-Range Attacks through Collaboration](https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02325), SRDS 2025.