Leqi (Jimmy) Zhu has received the 2021 Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) Doctoral Dissertation Award, in recognition of his thesis, “On the Space Complexity of Colourless Tasks.”

Zhu, a former PhD student advised by Professor Faith Ellen, is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan.

The award was created in 2012 to acknowledge and promote outstanding research by doctoral students on the principles of distributed computing.

The PODC award citation explains that Zhu’s thesis stands out for providing “a definitive solution to a classic and long-standing open problem in distributed computing: to determine the space complexity of consensus in asynchronous, shared-memory systems.” The award committee “also appreciated [the result’s] beautiful execution—a clean, textbook-quality proof.”