Helena has worked on cloud platforms, big data, analytics, ML, security and infrastructure at massive scale. Academically she did research in biological systems modeling, prediction and design, and polar biology. She is a committer to Akka, FiloDB, the Spark Cassandra Connector. She has been a keynote speaker at Scale By The Bay, Scala Days and a speaker at Kafka Summit, Spark Summit, Strata, QCon, Reactive Summit, Scala Days, Philly Emerging Tech, and is a Cassandra MVP. She has been on the program committee for Kafka Summit, Reactive Summit, and Strata.