Sisi Duan

Sisi Duan's research covers distributed systems, blockchain, and applied cryptography; working on building secure, high-performance distributed systems.   

Duan has proposed several representative Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols, such as BChain, CBFT, and BEAT. Among them, BChain is the first mature chain-based BFT protocol, which improves the throughput of classical protocols by 50% and reduces the message complexity from quadratic to linear, and is used in the Hyperledger Iroha project, one of the most well-known open-source blockchain platform in the industry. CBFT is a protocol that achieves the three security properties of availability, integrity, and confidentiality simultaneously.  The BEAT protocol is one of the most practical asynchronous consensus protocol known so far, consisting of five different subprotocols that are designed to meet different goals, e.g., different performance metrics, different application scenarios.   

Sisi Duan received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Davis in 2014, then worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as one of the key developers of the Department of Energy's EAGLE-I platform, and was the first Weinberg Fellow who works in the Computer Science area in the history of the lab. In 2020, she returned to China to join Tsinghua University's Institute for Advanced Study as a researcher, conducting further research in the design and application of core blockchain algorithms, system security, and applied cryptography.   

Duan has received numerous awards including the Distinguished Weinberg Fellow from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (the first-ever Weinberg Fellow in computing), the Maryland Innovation Award, the Maryland Cyber Warrior Women Award, the Leiv Eiriksson Mobility Program Award from the Research Council of Norway, and the top 100 worldwide in the Google I/O Code Jam for Women competition.