Michael Zargham

Dr. Zargham is the founder and Chief Engineer at BlockScience, as well as a core member of the Metagovernance Project. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania with a focus on Optimal Dynamic Resource Allocation Policies.

Zargham has over 15 years of experience designing algorithmic policies in a wide range of domains (including adtech, fintech, and cyber-physical systems). His ongoing focus is optimization and control of socio-technical infrastructures with an emphasis on participatory governance. Zargham’s research focus is on Generalized Dynamical Systems with special attention to systems whose state spaces contain non-numerical data; he is the architect of the open source python package cadCAD (complex adaptive dynamics computer-aided design) and has contributed to SourceCred, Gitcoin, Filecoin, The Graph, and many other public protocols. In addition to designing mechanisms at BlockScience, he contributes to the discourse on digital commons with attention to the oversight of algorithms by humans subjected to decisions by those algorithms as part of the Metagovernance Project.