Chiesa became an assistant professor at UC Berkeley in 2015. In 2018 he was named in MIT's Innovators Under 35 list.[2] In 2021 he became an associate professor at EPFL.[3]
Research
In 2013, Chiesa coauthored a paper and implementation of TinyRAM, a virtual machine whose execution could be proven using zero-knowledge proofs.[4]
In 2014, Chiesa coauthored the design of Zerocash,[5] which laid the foundation for the Zcash protocol. The work was recognized by the Test of Time Award at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.[6]
In 2020, Chiesa coauthored the design of Zexe, a related protocol which drew on ideas from Zerocash and extended it to arbitrary computations.[7] The Zexe design became the foundation of a blockchain called Aleo.[8]
^Ben-Sasson, Eli; Chiesa, Alessandro; Genkin, Daniel; Tromer, Eran; Virza, Madars. SNARKs for C: Verifying Program Executions Succinctly and in Zero Knowledge. CRYPTO 2013.
^Ben-Sasson, Eli; Chiesa, Alessandro; Garman, Christina; Green, Matthew; Miers, Ian; Eran, Tromer; Virza, Madars. Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin. 2014 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
^Almashaqbeh, Ghada; Solomon, Ravital. SoK: Privacy-Preserving Computing in the Blockchain Era. 2022 IEEE 7th European Symposium on Security and Privacy.