Heidi Howard

Heidi Howard is a computer scientist whose research bridges the theory and practice of distributed systems. Her work spans cloud computing; the security and resilience of distributed systems; distributed databases; and the formal verification of distributed protocols.

Heidi is a Senior Researcher in the Azure Research group at Microsoft Cambridge, where she co-leads the Confidential Consortium Framework, an open-source platform for building highly available applications with decentralized trust. She also serves as a Visiting Researcher in the Systems Research Group at the University of Cambridge.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Heidi was a Research Fellow, Research Associate and Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge and a Scholar-in-Residence and Affiliated Researcher at VMware Research. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2019 under the supervision of Prof. Jon Crowcroft and is best known for her contributions to distributed consensus, including the invention of Flexible Paxos.