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 distributed systems researcher with eight years of experience building and advising data-intensive systems. Her work bridges academia and industry—she has held visiting and advisory roles at Materialize, Microsoft Azure Research, Improbable, and Astronomer—bringing practical systems design into privacy-conscious, real-time data platforms. She contributed to Materialize’s chbench demo, improving Postgres integration, Debezium consistency handling, and multi-partition timestamp reliability, highlighting a rare combination of database internals and production-focused engineering. Trained with a PhD in Distributed Systems from UT Austin and a Computer Science degree from Cambridge, she couples rigorous formal thinking with hands-on systems implementation. Based in Berkeley, she is now expanding into usable decentralized systems as a researcher at Subzero Labs, signaling a shift toward human-centered infrastructure. An uncommon extra: her background includes dual legal studies, giving her a nuanced perspective on the intersection of systems, privacy, and regulation.
8 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Baccalaureat Section Scientifique, Baccalaureat Section Scientifique at Ecole AlsacienneDoctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science - Distributed Systems, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science - Distributed Systems at The University of Texas at AustinComputer Science Bachelors Databases & Distributed Systems, Computer Science Bachelors Databases & Distributed Systems at University of Cambridge
English, French, German, Spanish
Stackoverflow
1,682reputation
97kreached
9answers
79questions
Github Skills (15)
debezium10
kafka10
postgresql10
database-design9
rust9
distributed-systems8
materialized-view8
sql8
graph6
opencl6
networkx6
linker6
python6
graphviz6
java6
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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