Irene Y. Zhang

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I am a researcher at Microsoft Research.

My research focuses on datacenter operating systems and distributed systems.

I am especially interested in making it easier to build microsecond-scale datacenter systems by leveraging new datacenter hardware technologies, like kernel-bypass, RDMA and programmable devices. My most recent work has been on the Demikernel datapath OS and related projects. A bio and talk abstract for my most recent work is available.

I completed my PhD in 2017 at the University of Washington, where my research focused on distributed systems that span mobile devices and cloud servers. My thesis work received the ACM SIGOPS Dennis Ritchie doctoral dissertation award and the UW Allen School William Chan doctoral dissertion award. Before my PhD, I received my S.B. and M.Eng. from MIT and worked for 3 years in the virtual machine monitor group at VMware.

I was born in Beijing, China but spent most of my time growing up in Columbus, Indiana. My husband and I like to cook, travel and occasionally do computer science together.

Contact

Systems Research Group at Microsoft Research