N crooks

Natacha Crooks will join the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences faculty as an assistant professor in 2020 after completing her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Social networks serve a global population, e-commerce sites must sustain an ever growing load, and medical applications increasingly offload sensitive information to the cloud. These systems must all remain available in the presence of natural disasters and human attacks. They must serve a global population and preserve the privacy of their users. My research focuses on building systems that meet these requirements.”

Research Focus: Improving consistency and security in the context of large-scale, geographically distributed systems.

What is an example of how is this applied in the world?

Electronic Medical Records

Why is this area important to you? 

Modern applications place increasingly stringent requirements on the storage systems that underpin them. Social networks serve a global population, e-commerce sites must sustain an ever growing load, and medical applications increasingly offload sensitive information to the cloud. These systems must all remain available in the presence of natural disasters and human attacks. They must serve a global population and preserve the privacy of their users. My research focuses on building systems that meet these requirements. I draw from database theory, distributed computing, and security to build storage systems with clean abstractions, strong formal guarantees, and good performance.