Heidi Picher Dempsey is the Research Director, Northeast US for Red Hat. She works to seek out and grow research and open source projects with academic and commercial partners in areas such as operating systems, hybrid clouds, performance optimization, networking, security, AI and operations. As a network engineer and operations leader, she designed, built, integrated and operated many different nationwide suites of prototype cloud infrastructure for academic, government and industry use, including the National Science Foundation's GENI project clouds. As part of the CTO Research program, she encourages diverse participation in computer science and engineering research, and promotes collaborations with Red Hat researchers.