YINS PhD candidate Nikolaos Papadis has been awarded the 2019 IBM PhD Fellowship. Nikolaos is an Electrical Engineering PhD candidate working with Professor Leandros Tassiulas, the John C. Malone Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and Chair of the Electrical Engineering Department.  

IBM created the PhD Fellowship program in the 1950s to recognize and support outstanding graduate students. The IBM PhD Fellowship Awards Program is an intensely competitive worldwide program, which honors exceptional PhD students who have an interest in solving problems that are important to IBM and fundamental to innovation across academic disciplines and fields of study.  

Nikolaos’s research at YINS focuses on designing and building secure and scalable decentralized ecosystems for the sharing economy. He is interested in blockchain technology and networks, which have the potential to improve the way we interact with each other by enabling secure and trustless disintermediated collaboration. Nikolaos is studying the theory, mathematical modeling, scalability, security, and tradeoffs of blockchain protocols and networks, and in parallel investigating decentralized digital identity mechanisms as a tool for achieving privacy and data ownership in the sharing economy.  

His research exemplifies the interdisciplinarity of network science work at YINS, blending students and faculty from within computer science fields (e.g. distributed systems, cryptography, networking, security and privacy) and from outside of computer science, such as economics, law, and healthcare. The intersection of varied and multiple academic disciplines at YINS makes research more productive and dynamic.