Soujanya Ponnapalli
I am a systems researcher. I love building systems that are not just fast and scalable, but also reliable, providing strong guarantees, such as performance isolation and fault tolerance, in practice.
I am on the job market this year!
I am a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, working with Natacha Crooks and Matei Zaharia at the Sky Computing Lab. Before that, I completed my PhD at UT Austin with Vijay Chidambaram, in the Systems and Storage Lab and the Lab for Advanced Systems Research. My dissertation aimed at minimizing I/O bottlenecks to achieve scalable, high-throughput systems. Prior to that, I earned my Bachelor’s with Honors in Computer Science and Engineering from IIIT Hyderabad, where I worked with Suresh Purini. I have always been equally passionate about academic and non-academic pursuits, and in recognition, I received the best all-rounder gold medal.
My research sits at the intersection of distributed and storage systems. I enjoy rethinking how systems should be designed to meet both the guarantees and performance that applications need and expect. Take a look at the broad research themes I have been working on!
Selected Publications
SkyStore: Cost-Optimized Object Storage Across Regions and Clouds
Best of VLDB’25 nomination
The full publication list with key insights behind each work!
Research Themes
Selected News
Rethinking Fault Tolerance: Abstractions, Guarantees, and Performance!
Awarded a fellowship to attend SuRI at EPFL
Proposal: Building Scalable and IO-efficient Authenticated Storage Systems
Vijay Chidambaram, Emmett Witchel, James Bornholt, Jonathan Goldstein, Natacha Crooks
Industry Research
- Microsoft ResearchRedmond, 2022 · Jonathan Goldstein
Redmond, 2020 · Anirudh Badam
Cambridge, 2019 · Dushyanth Narayanan and Antony Rowstron - VMware ResearchCalifornia, 2018 · Michael Wei and Dahlia Malkhi
- PatentRecoverable Processes, US application 17/981,296
Poster: Recovery Can Be Simple, Sky Retreat 2024
Selected Awards
- Summer Research Institute (SuRI) Fellowship, EPFL, 2025
- James C. Browne Graduate Fellowship, UT Austin, 2017–18
- Best of VLDB’25 nomination, for SkyStore
Service
- Program CommitteeOSDI'26, NSDI'26, ATC'25, NSDI'25, EuroSys'25
- External Review CommitteeFAST'25, ATC'24, NSDI'19
- Journal ReviewerACM TOCS 2024
- NSF ReviewerProposal review panel, 2026
- OtherHallway discussion lead, SOSP'21
Shadow PC, EuroSys'20
Mentoring and Leadership
- I have mentored PhD, Masters, and undergraduate students. See who I have worked with and what we built together.
- I have mentored women in CS (WiCS) at UT Austin, and researchers at conferences.
- I co-founded and chaired the Graduate Application Assistance Program (GAAP) at UT Austin.
- I co-organize the Sky Systems Seminar at Berkeley, and have organized the Databases Seminar there and the Systems Seminar at UT Austin's Lab for Advanced Systems Research.
Get in Touch!
If you would like to present your systems research at the Sky seminar, or just want to talk about any of this, please reach out: soujanya at berkeley dot edu · LinkedIn