Karin Strauss

Karin Strauss is a Senior Principal Research Manager at Microsoft and an Affiliate Professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Her pioneering work bridges computer science, systems engineering, and environmental sustainability, with a focus on revolutionary approaches to data storage and computing infrastructure that address the growing gap between data generation and storage capacity.

Dr. Strauss received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007. Prior to Microsoft, she collaborated with IBM Research on the Blue Gene project during her doctoral studies and subsequently worked at AMD Research for nearly two years.

Her research centers on sustainable computing solutions, most notably the development of DNA data storage technology. She has pioneered methods to store digital information in synthetic DNA, leveraging its extraordinary density (one exabyte of data in a cubic inch), durability (thousands of years under proper conditions), and future-readiness. Her work extends to hardware accelerators for machine learning, emerging memory technologies, and sustainable AI through Project Zerix and Project Carbonix.

• 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company (2016)
• Best of What's New by Popular Science (2016)
• Top 10 Emerging Technologies by World Economic Forum (2019)

Dr. Strauss leads Microsoft's DNA Data Storage Project, collaborating with the University of Washington since the project's inception, along with partners including Twist Bioscience and ETH Zurich. Her multidisciplinary team spans coding theorists, computer architects, mechanical engineers, and molecular biologists from around the globe, working to automate the DNA storage process and scale it for practical implementation. She has recently expanded her research to explore molecular-level operations on DNA-stored data through DNA nanotechnology.