Ant is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, leading a team looking at future hardware technologies for the cloud across storage, networking, and computing, and most are focused on new optical-based technologies. The most well-known project is probably Project Silica, which is trying to use glass for long-term archival storage. Ant is a systems researcher at heart who has spent most of his career working at the intersection of Storage, Networking, and Distributed Systems, and he is best known as one of the original inventors of structured overlays or Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) (called Pastry) and the first large-scale key-value storage system (PAST SOSP’01). In 2016, he was awarded the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, and in 2021, the ACM EuroSys Lifetime Achievement Award. In September 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.