Heather is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Before that, she was the co-founder and Executive Director of the Scala Center at EPFL, where she was also a research scientist, as well as an Assistant Clinical Professor at Northeastern University. She recently completed her PhD in EPFL’s Faculty of Computer and Communication Science where she contributed to the now-widespread programming language, Scala. Heather’s research interests are at the intersection of data-centric distributed systems and programming languages, with a focus on transferring her research results into industrial use. She has also led development of popular MOOCs some 1 million students strong, such as “Functional Programming Principles in Scala.”