The IOTA Foundation supports the creation of state-of-the-art distributed ledger technologies, to form the backbone of a future automated data-driven society. With this monumental task comes a growing responsibility for oversight and governance of this potentially world-changing technology. To this end, we have already established a board of directors to set the vision and strategy, and a supervisory board to oversee their work.We have also been growing a formidable research team, one of the largest in DLT organizations, consisting of world-leading research professors, PhD researchers and scientists. Today we announce the formation of a Research Council to oversee their work.The IOTA Research Council will work closely with our research department to set the strategic technological direction, provide academic oversight to IOTA research, assess and grant funding to academic partners, and oversee collaboration with academia and other research organizations. The Research Council will consist of distinguished academics that are at the forefront of their area of expertise. It will not only provide invaluable input to the research strategy and initiatives, but will also oversee the quality of our research to ensure high academic standards.The first members of the research council include:Professor Gur HubermanDr. Moody AlamMyself (Serguei Popov)We will be seeking to further add experienced academics to the Research Council.Introducing the IOTA Research Council was originally published in IOTA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.