Natacha Crooks

Natacha Crooks

Dr. Natacha Crooks is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on distributed systems, databases, and security, with a particular emphasis on consistency models, BFT protocols, and cloud computing. She is a founding member of the SkyLab and a core contributor to the Data Systems and Foundations Group at Berkeley. She holds a Ph.D. in Distributed Systems from the University of Texas at Austin (2019) and a BA in Computer Science and Law from the University of Cambridge (2012).

Affiliations & Roles:

• Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley EECS
• Visiting Researcher at Azure Research, Security & Privacy
• Founding Member of SkyLab
• Member of Berkeley Center for Decentralized Intelligence
• Former Scientific Advisor at Improbable and Astronomer

Research Interests: Her work bridges distributed systems and database research, addressing challenges in transactional consistency, fault-tolerant protocols, and cloud resource optimization. Key themes include:

• Designing scalable BFT consensus algorithms
• Secure multi-cloud storage solutions
• Optimizing distributed transaction processing
• Privacy-preserving distributed systems

Awards & Recognition:

• Sloan Research Fellow (2025)
• NSF CAREER Award
• ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award (2020)
• IEEE CS TCDE Early Career Award (2024)

Teaching: Fall 2025: CS 294-282 (Research Culture and Community Norms), Wheeler 130.

Industrial Collaboration: Prior roles include visiting researcher at Cornell University, Microsoft Research (DMX group), and Imperial College London. Industrial partnerships include work with Materialize, Astronomer, and Improbable.