Heidi Howard

Heidi Howard is a Research Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge's Trinity Hall and an Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Technology. Her research focuses on distributed computing, emphasizing system consistency, resilience, and consensus algorithms like Paxos. She earned her Ph.D. from Cambridge in 2019 for work on Distributed Consensus, notably inventing Flexible Paxos. Currently, she is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge in the Confidential Computing group. Previously, she held roles at VMware Research.

Education: PhD in Computer Science (2019), University of Cambridge.

Research Interests: Heidi’s work bridges theoretical and practical aspects of distributed systems. She explores security, privacy, and cryptography within systems, aiming to enhance trustworthiness and reliability. Her contributions include improving consensus protocols for scalable and fault-tolerant systems.

Labs/Teams: Microsoft Research’s Confidential Computing group, Cambridge University’s Department of Computer Science and Technology.