Ariah Klages-Mundt

I am a PhD candidate in applied math at Cornell University, where I am a Bloomberg Fellow and Commercialization Fellow. My research is at the intersection of computer science and economics on the design of decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and economic networks. I've been an early pioneer in DeFi research, including characterizing in 2019 the deleveraging spiral crisis in the stablecoin Dai that was later experienced on Black Thursday in March 2020. I presented this work at the European Central Bank in 2019.

Since 2021, I have co-organized the DeFi Workshop at the Financial Cryptography and Data Security Conference.

Another area of my work focuses on developing new tools to overcome computational and parameter sensitivity problems that make the application of economic and financial network models unfeasible in real world contexts. My work in this area has made several strides, including (i) characterizing dangerous structures that can emerge in these networks to cause unintuitive risk concentration, (ii) developing efficient methods to quantify parameter sensitivity and so indicate which parts in an economic network face lower risks of model error, and (iii) developing scalable methods for network interventions and importance sampling of tail cascade events.

My PhD advisor is Andreea Minca  and my PhD committee includes Steve Strogatz and Sid Banerjee.

Before starting my PhD, I worked in the financial technology sector.