Alessandro Chiesa is a faculty member in computer science at UC Berkeley. His research spans the areas of complexity theory, cryptography, and security, and focuses on the theoretical foundations and practical implementations of zero knowledge proofs that are short and easy to verify. He is a co-inventor of the Zerocash protocol, and is an author of libsnark — the leading open-source library for succinct zero knowledge proofs. He received his PhD in computer science from MIT in 2014, and BS degrees in computer science and mathematics from MIT in 2009.