At the MIT Bitcoin Expo earlier this month I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Neha Narula, the Director of the Digital Currency Initiative under the MIT Media Lab. 

Neha previously studied at MIT, completing her PhD in 2015. Her research and work has tended to focus on distributed systems and databases, with many contributions involving analysis of the potential shortcomings and risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). 

She previously worked on relaunching the news aggregation platform Digg, and worked at Google as a senior software engineer, where she designed Blobstore, a scheme for redundant replication and delivery of massive amounts of data. 

We discussed the history of the MIT DCI and its role in the history of Bitcoin development in research, as well as the role of academic research in general as it relates to Bitcoin and cryptographic or blockchain systems. 

You can watch the interview here: