Natacha Crooks

Natacha Crooks is an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). She works on designing large-scale computer systems that are scalable, secure, and trustworthy. Her primary focus currently centers on designing both privacy-preserving storage systems and decentralized systems, that is systems that do not have a single root of trust. Prior to working at UC Berkeley, she was a graduate researcher at Cornell University (USA), the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (Germany) and the University of Cambridge (UK). She has also held visiting positions at Microsoft Research Redmond (USA), INRIA (France) and Imperial College London (UK). She is originally from Paris, France.

On the industrial-side, Natacha is currently an advisor at Improbable, advising the company on their new M2 network. The M2 network uses blockchain technology to fundamentally revisit how users interact with games in the metaverse area. In the past, she was a consultant at Astronomer, a company that facilitates data orchestration in the cloud, where she helped design their security infrastructure. Prior to that, she was a visiting scientist at Materialize, a company that focuses on faster data analytics, where she remains a technical advisor.

Natacha’s academic work received the Dennis Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award for the Best Dissertation in the field of Computer Systems, as well as the Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award for the Best Dissertation in the field of Databases (Honorable Mention). Most recently, she received a Google Faculty Award for “Significant Contributions to Systems Research” and a VMWare Early Career Faculty Award.