Ava Howell is a core engineer at Penumbra Labs. Previously, she was a principal security engineer at NCC Group's Cryptography Services, providing design and implementation reviews for a variety of clients for everything from novel blockchain consensus systems and smart contracts to custom cryptographic protocols, as well as doing research in cryptography and systems security. Prior to that, she was a core developer at Nebulous Labs working on Sia, a blockchain-based marketplace for data storage.