Dr. Neha Narula ’99 is helping redefine the future of money by researching cryptocurrencies and providing clarity on how digital currencies will transform our world. In short, she is a research scientist, engineer, and currency futurist. Neha is director of research at the Digital Currency Initiative, a part of the MIT Media Lab where she teaches courses and leads cryptocurrency and blockchain research. While completing her PhD in computer science at MIT, she built fast, scalable databases and secure software systems, and she spoke about these topics at dozens of industry and research conferences.
In a previous life, Dr. Narula helped relaunch the news aggregator Digg and was a senior software engineer at Google. There, she designed Blobstore, a system for storing and serving petabytes of immutable data, and worked on Native Client, a system for running native code securely through a browser. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Blockchain and has given several TED talks on the Future of Money. Named to WIRED’s list of 25 leaders shaping the next 25 years of technology. She also appeared on Amanpour & Company and 60 Minutes. She is a member of the Program Committees for EuroSys 2019, IEEE Security & Privacy 2020, Financial Cryptography v2020, Symposium on Cloud Computing 2020, and Stanford Blockchain Conference 2020.
