Jen Helsby is a core engineer at Penumbra Labs. Prior to joining Penumbra Labs, she was the lead developer for the SecureDrop project which enables private communications between journalists and their sources, and a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Data Science and Public Policy at the University of Chicago. In a former life, she studied the large-scale structure of the universe, and completed a Ph.D. in astrophysics at the University of Chicago in 2015.