Ava Howell
Account Executive at Boston University
Brookline, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAva Howell is a communications and public relations professional with 11 years of experience blending strategic messaging, audience research, and creative content for nonprofit and client-facing projects. Based in Brookline, MA, she combines academic research on political communication and internet memes with hands-on PR work—crafting campaigns, brand toolkits, and social media strategies while presenting recommendations directly to stakeholders. Unexpectedly, Ava also contributes to open-source blockchain infrastructure as a back-end developer, with notable work on privacy-focused projects like Penumbra and the Sia storage marketplace, demonstrating strong systems thinking and code-level rigor. Her cross-disciplinary background—spanning research, client services, and technical contributions—gives her a rare ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear public-facing narratives.
11 years of coding experience
Newton North High SchoolBoston University
Github Skills (25)
crypto-wallet10
wallet10
transaction10
bitcoin-wallet10
pool10
sia10
decentralized-exchange10
go10
cryptography10
blockchain10
dex10
rust10
ethereum-wallet10
distributed-systems9
tendermint9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
penumbra-zone/penumbra
Nov 2021 - Jan 2023
Penumbra is a fully private proof-of-stake network and decentralized exchange for the Cosmos ecosystem.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 104 reviews, 203 commits in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Ava primarily contributed to the development and implementation of core functionality related to Penumbra, a fully private proof-of-stake network and decentralized exchange. Their commits focused on defining and integrating asset denominations within the system, implementing key structures for handling financial value, and enabling initial validator configurations within the database. The user's work also involved enabling IBC functionality, including the implementation of client and connection handling.
exchangeprivacyethereumproof-of-stakedecentralized-exchange
NebulousLabs/Sia
Aug 2017 - Nov 2017
Blockchain-based marketplace for file storage. Project has moved to GitLab: https://gitlab.com/NebulousLabs/Sia
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:52 commits, 92 PRs, 378 pushes in 2 months
Contributions summary:Ava primarily focused on improving the Sia blockchain storage marketplace, as evidenced by the changes in wallet and transaction pool modules. Their work involved updating fee estimation logic for defragmentation transactions to use transaction pool fees. Further contributions included addressing code review comments, improving fee and locking patterns, and ensuring early contract renewals based on funds exhaustion. The user also made several code quality improvements and added bounds checking.
marketplacefile-storageblockchaingitlabdecentralized
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