Current Position & Biography
Natacha Crooks is an associate professor in the University of California, Berkeley’s electrical engineering and computer sciences department. Her research connects distributed systems, databases and security. Her personal biography also identifies a part-time research appointment at Subzero Labs and a founding role in Berkeley’s SkyLab. She earned her doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin. The United States field follows her Berkeley university appointment and published campus office, not an assumption about nationality or private residence.
Notable Contributions
Crooks coauthored Picsou: Enabling Replicated State Machines to Communicate Efficiently, presented at USENIX OSDI in 2025. The work tackles communication between separately replicated services. It introduces Cross-Cluster Consistent Broadcast and implements it in Picsou, supporting communication across both crash-tolerant and Byzantine-fault-tolerant protocols. Quorum acknowledgments help distinguish confirmed reception from likely message loss. The paper’s performance findings come from evaluated applications and microbenchmarks; they are not an unconditional promise for every network or blockchain. This is a collaborative systems contribution, not sole authorship.
Why Katharos.ai Is Following Them
Katharos.ai is following the systems foundations behind decentralized infrastructure. A service can agree internally yet still struggle to exchange reliable information with another service. That distinction matters when assessing claims about interoperability: agreement within one group is not automatically agreement between groups. Work that makes the interface explicit can help separate a protocol’s demonstrated properties from a product’s broader marketing language.
Areas to Follow
Areas to follow include implementation transparency, failure recovery, reproducible comparisons and evidence that security assumptions survive integration. It is especially useful to distinguish a stopped participant from a dishonest one, and to ask what each side can verify about the other. These are editorial evaluation priorities rather than claims that a particular bridge, token or production deployment has been independently validated.
Reporting Scope
The current associate-professor title is supported by the university directory and the body of Crooks’s own biography; an older assistant-professor heading on her website is not treated as current. Industry involvement is attributed to her own page. This profile discusses systems research relevant to blockchain infrastructure without equating the cited paper with a complete cross-chain bridge, an investment product or a guarantee against asset loss.
Sources for Further Reading
https://nacrooks.github.io/ https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/ncrooks.html https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi25/presentation/frank
Photo Credit
Photo: Adam Lau / Berkeley Engineering, via Natacha Crooks’s personal website. © UC Regents, all rights reserved. Reduced full photograph with neutral padding; limited editorial identification, not endorsement. Original attribution metadata retained. The original personal-site image identifies Adam Lau as photographer and UC Regents as copyright holder. No open license or unrestricted reuse permission is asserted. The small, complete photograph identifies the researcher in a factual profile; original EXIF, XMP and other JPEG metadata remain attached. No facial alteration is made.
Editorial Disclaimer
This profile summarizes information from the cited sources. Katharos.ai does not endorse the subject or guarantee every source claim’s authenticity.