Heidi Howard

About Me

I am a Senior Researcher in the Confidential Computing group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. My research sits at the intersection between the theory and practice of distributed computing, with a focus on developing resilient and trustworthy distributed computer systems. Previously, I was a Research Fellow in Computer Science at Cambridge University’s Trinity Hall, an Affiliated/Visiting Researcher at VMware Research, and an Affiliated Lecturer at Cambridge University’s Department of Computer Science and Technology. I received my Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 2019 for my research on Distributed Consensus and I am probably best known for my work on the Paxos algorithm, and in particular, the invention of Flexible Paxos. You can often find me on twitter: @heidiann360.

Research interests

• distributed systems, cloud computing, distributed databases & storage systems
• fault-tolerance, distributed consensus, byzantine agreement, availability & replication
• distributed algorithms, consistency models, formal methods & the theory of distributed computing

Contact me

You can reach by email at heidi dot howard at microsoft dot com.