Neha Narula

She may have ignored Bitcoin while working on her PhD in 2011, but Narula’s work on distributed systems and databases during her higher education years proved an apt segue into the crypto world. Now Narula, a former Google engineer, is director of the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT. Within that university research group, Narula is addressing cryptocurrency’s biggest barriers to widespread acceptance, including scalability and privacy. Today, many look to DCI’s research in order to make sense of the field.