I received my Ph.D. in finance from UCLA Anderson School of Management and B.S. in mathematics from Fudan University (Shanghai, China) prior to joining George Mason. My current research interest is at the intersection of economics and computer science, including blockchain technologies and FinTech applications. My research papers analyze the incentives of participants in distributed consensus protocols, the role of crypto tokens in jumpstarting platforms, the industrial organization of cryptocurrency mining pools with implications for blockchain (de-)centralization and energy consumption, factor structures in cryptocurrency returns, manipulations on crypto exchange, crypto derivatives, cross-chain commutation, the reliability of blockchain explorers, and the security design of investment crowdfunding for both investors and entrepreneurs to harness "wisdom of the crowd". I have also studied information economics, the theory of the firm, mechanism design, governance, and market microstructure. 

My research has been accepted in leading business/financial economics journals including the Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, and Management Science as well as leading computer science conferences/workshops including ACM Web (WWW) and Financial Cryptography (FC), among others. My ongoing research is supported by the prestigious NSF CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, and my past work has won the Yihong Xia Best Paper Award at CICF and Chicago Quantitative Alliance (CQA) academic paper competition, along with many other paper prizes. I have taught blockchain technologies to both MBA and undergraduate students, served on the committees of major blockchain conferences such as Financial Crypto, ACM Advances in Financial Technologies, CCS DeFi, and IEEE Crypto Valley, and partnered with the U.S. government and private sectors on blockchain economics research. My students in the Master of Management program have voted me "Faculty of the Year" (one recipient per year from the entire faculty). 

A non-technical overview talk on some of my blockchain research at UC Berkeley's Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IybadmGPtM&feature=youtu.be