Natacha Crooks
Assistant Professor at University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNatacha Crooks is an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley and a Visiting Researcher with Microsoft Azure Research, bringing eight years of experience at the intersection of distributed systems, databases, and privacy. Her work bridges academia and industry through advisory and visiting roles at Materialize, Improbable, and Astronomer, with a focus on real-time data integration, transactional correctness, and system reliability. She has hands-on open-source impact in Materialize’s real-time SQL streaming project, where she hardened the chbench demo by adding Postgres support, Debezium consistency-topic handling, improved timestamping, and multi-partition fixes to make transaction testing more reliable. Natacha holds a PhD in distributed systems from UT Austin and a first-class Computer Science degree from Cambridge where she ranked top of her year, and she also completed a rare double maîtrise in British and French law. Based in Berkeley, she blends formal verification instincts with pragmatic system engineering to turn subtle correctness requirements into reproducible demos and production-ready code. Colleagues praise her ability to translate deep theory into concrete reliability improvements across complex distributed environments.
8 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Baccalaureat, Section Scientifique, Mention Très Bien 18.63/20, Baccalaureat, Section Scientifique, Mention Très Bien 18.63/20 at Ecole AlsacienneDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Science - Distributed Systems, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Science - Distributed Systems at The University of Texas at AustinLaw - Double Maitrise, British & French Law, 2.i, Law - Double Maitrise, British & French Law, 2.i at University of Cambridge
English, French, German, Spanish
Stackoverflow
1,682reputation
97kreached
9answers
79questions
Github Skills (17)
postgresql10
debezium10
kafka10
database-design9
rust9
materialized-views8
distributed-system8
materialized-view8
sql8
distributed-systems8
linker6
graphviz6
graph6
opencl6
networkx6
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
MaterializeInc/materialize
Jan 2020 - Jul 2020
Real-time Data Integration and Transformation: use SQL to transform, deliver, and act on fast-changing data.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:140 commits, 81 PRs, 37 pushes in 6 months
Contributions summary:Natacha primarily contributed to the `chbench` demo, focusing on database integration and transaction testing. They modified the demo's code to support Postgres databases, including creating and altering database schemas. Furthermore, the user added support for Debezium consistency topics, which required modifications to the consistency format and timestamping logic. They also implemented improvements in the source code to address multi-partition issues and improve the reliability of the timestamping and source code.
streamsdata-warehousedistributed-sql-databasestreamingpostgresql-dialect
nacrooks/materialize
Feb 2020 - Jul 2020
The Streaming Data Warehouse
Contributions:281 pushes, 46 branches in 5 months
stream-processingstreaming-data-warehousewarehousestreaming-datadatawarehouse
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