I’m a PhD student at UC Berkeley in the Sky Computing Lab, co-advised by Joe Hellerstein and Natacha Crooks. My research goal is to enable the rapid evolution of distributed systems without sacrificing correctness.

I am a member of the Hydro project, a Rust framework for writing correct and performant distributed systems. This initiative began at Berkeley and is currently gaining adoption within AWS.

In my spare time, I love playing badminton, teaching, and listening to classical music. Here’s a video of my senior recital at Cornell, where I performed Brahms Ballades Op. 10, Thomas Ades’ Darknesse Visible, and Beethoven’s Appassionata Op. 57, one of my favorite sonatas.

Publications

DistOptimize: Automatic Optimization of Distributed Protocols
Github
David Chu McElroy, Shadaj Laddad, Lucky Katahanas, Mingwei Samuel, Octavio Lomeli, Natacha Crooks, Joe Hellerstein, & Mohsen Lesani
Under Submission

Rollbaccine: Herd Immunity Against Rollbacks for TEEs
Video / Poster / Github / Technical Report
David Chu, Aditya Balasubramanian, Dee Bao, Natacha Crooks, Heidi Howard, Lucky Katahanas, & Soujanya Ponnapalli
SIGMOD 2026

Bigger, not Badder: Safely Scaling BFT Protocols
Poster / Github
David Chu, Chris Liu, Natacha Crooks, Joe Hellerstein, & Heidi Howard
PaPoC 2024

Optimizing Distributed Protocols with Query Rewrites
Video / Poster / Github / Technical Report
David Chu, Rithvik Panchapakesan, Shadaj Laddad, Lucky Katahanas, Chris Liu, Kaushik Shivakumar, Natacha Crooks, Joe Hellerstein, & Heidi Howard
SOSP 2021 Student Research Competition (Winner)
SIGMOD 2024

Take Out the TraChe: Maximizing (Tra)nsactional Ca(che) Hit Rate
Audrey Cheng, David Chu, Terrance Li, Jason Chan, Natacha Crooks, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Ion Stoica, & Xiangyao Yu
OSDI 2023

Scalog: Seamless Reconfiguration and Total Order in a Scalable Shared Log
Cong Ding, David Chu, Evan Zhao, Xiang Li, Lorenzo Alvisi, & Robbert Van Renesse
NSDI 2020

Reliable, Efficient Recovery for Complex Services with Replicated Subsystems
Free link
Edward Tremel, Sagar Jha, Weijia Song, David Chu, & Ken Birman
DSN 2020

Recent News

6/3/26 I presented Rollbaccine at SIGMOD 2026
2/26/26 I was awarded the MongoDB PhD Fellowship!
10/20/25 I was invited to talk at Princeton SNS Group
6/22/25 I presented Rollbaccine at Confidential Computing Summit 2025
1/7/25 I was awarded the RDI Frontier Fellows Award!

Awards & Service

2026 MongoDB PhD Fellowship
2025 RDI Frontier Fellows Award
2024 SIGMOD ARI Reviewer
2024 HPTS Best Gong Show Talk
2023-2026 UC Berkeley EECS Evergreen Graduate Research Award
2021-2023 UC Berkeley SRC-URO Award
2021 ACM SOSP Student Research Competition Winner

Check out my old projects here!