My name is Shai, but you can call me Deshe.

I live in Jerusalem, with my fiancé Noa and our cat Nacho.

My best-known work is my technical, educational, and spokesmanship contributions to the Kaspa cryptocurrency, network, and community, but this is not my only work (see my content).

I am adamant and passionate about making science and math approachable and exciting. I wrote many popular science pieces for local outlets (in Hebrew) and gave popular science lectures on various topics, spanning more than a decade.

Among my educational endeavors, I spend my Thursdays teaching university classes to gifted teenagers in the Odyssey program.

In October 2024, I graduated from the Hebrew University with a Ph.D in quantum cryptography under the co-advisory of Dorit Aharonov from HUJI and Or Sattath from BGU. The title of my dissertation is “Extending Cryptographic Schemes With Post-Quantum Cryptography”. My favorite result therein is the Lifted FawkesCoin protocol — the first complete solution for securely transferring funds from a quantum-attackable address, even after quantum computers have emerged.

During my Ph.D, I worked as a researcher in DAGLabs, where I was privileged to participate in designing the Kaspa protocol and reference implementation. My work includes (co-)designing several of the algorithms that make Kaspa work, and formalizing the analysis to ensure its security.

Before my Ph.D I wrote an M.Sc thesis in mathematical logic under the advisory of Ehud Hrushovski and Itay Kaplan, titled (brace yourselves) closed normal subgroups of permutation groups of smoothly approximable structures.

During my master's, I worked as an algorithm developer in Mobileye. Whenever you see an autonomous vehicle automatically stopping at a street crossing, it might be running my code :)

During my advanced degrees, I held teaching positions at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and the Open University. I taught a variety of TCS and math courses, (including, but not limited to, calculus, advanced calculus, probability theory, data structures, algorithm design, object-oriented programming, functional programming in Haskell, and mathematical logic),

Before that, I did a B.Sc with a major in computer science and an extended major in mathematics. During that time I worked as a firmware engineer in Intel.

The work at Intel was decently interesting and comfortable enough that most of my colleagues were content, but I was miserable there. It was during that time that I realized software engineering was not the correct career path for me. I love hard work, but not that kind of work.

Going before age 23 my biography becomes a bit hectic. I dropped out of high school at 15 due to undiagnosed depression, anxiety, and AD&D, and fell into a spiral of self-abuse. Being able to climb out of that abyss and regain control of my life is what I consider my greatest life achievement (second maybe to ensnaring betrothed).

When not doing tech related stuff, I like to play guitar, bass and piano, sing in a group, read, and play games (in particular, one of my common pastimes is losing at chess).

My favorite color is light purple, I like Better Call Soul much more than Breaking Bad but maybe not as much as The Wire. I always enjoy a good whiskey and a nice cigar.