Mohammad Sadoghi Named Chancellor’s Fellow
Associate Professor of Computer Science Mohammad Sadoghi is among this year’s class of Chancellor’s Fellows at the University of California, Davis. The distinction is given annually to early-career academics who are doing exemplary work in their fields.
Sadoghi’s work focuses on large-scale databases, distributed ledgers and blockchains. These systems distribute data across many computer systems, which must agree on what the data are, even if the systems do not necessarily “trust” each other. His work has implications not only for data verification but also for how computer systems and the technology industry understand and implement laws governing data security and privacy.
Sadoghi founded Apache ResilientDB, a distributed ledger built on a democratic, decentralized computer model. His recent book, The Problems of Consensus: An Ethical Inquiry into Democratic and Decentralized Principles, explores the concept of consensus, weaving together ethical, epistemological, theological, sociological and computational perspectives into a unified dialogue.
“[Sadoghi’s] work is at once principled and practical: He rethinks consensus from first principles, proves what is possible under realistic assumptions and then transforms those ideas into robust open-source systems,” wrote Amr El Abbadi, Distinguished Professor of computer science at UC Santa Barbara, in support of Sadoghi’s nomination.
The Chancellor’s Fellows program, created in 2000, awards $25,000 in unrestricted philanthropic funding to support the recipients’ research or scholarly work. Chancellor’s Fellows awards are supported by private contributions to the UC Davis Annual Fund, Parents Fund and Davis Chancellor's Club Fund.