Keren Censor-Hillel is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Her research interests are mainly in distributed computing, especially probabilistic algorithms and lower bounds, and in theory of computing in general.

Keren’s  PhD thesis “Probabilistic Methods in Distributed Computing” was written at the Technion, under the supervision of Prof. Hagit Attiya. In her thesis, Keren managed to settle a problem that had been open for almost ten years! She pulled together tools from the theory of stochastic processes and product probability spaces in order to prove tight bounds on the complexity of achieving randomized consensus, a key problem in distributed computing. Her results revived the problem of randomized consensus, which has been dormant for many years and enabled studying it in other contexts.

After completing her PhD in 2010, Keren spend two years as a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at the Theory Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was awarded the Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellowship from Yad Hanadiv.

Keren started her work as assistant professor in the Technion in 2012 and was awarded the Alon Fellowship from the Israel Council of Higher Education as well as the Shalon Career Advancement Chair from the Technion.

Keren has reviewed for and has been widely published in a variety of scientific journals including Distributed Computing, SIAM Journal on Computing and IEEE Transactions on Information Theory,  the Journal of the ACM the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems and the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing.