Sylvia Ratnasamy (born c. 1976) is a Belgian–Indian computer scientist. She is best known as one of the inventors of the distributed hash table (DHT). Her doctoral dissertation proposed the content-addressable networks, one of the original DHTs, and she received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2014 for this work.^[1] She is currently a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ratnasamy received her Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Pune in 1997.^[2] She began doctoral work at UC Berkeley advised by Scott Shenker^[3] during which time she worked at the International Computer Science Institute^[2] in Berkeley, CA. She graduated from UC Berkeley with her doctoral degree in 2002.^[3]

For her doctoral thesis, she designed and implemented what would eventually become known as one of the four original Distributed Hash Tables, the Content addressable network (CAN).^[4][5]

Ratnasamy was a lead researcher at Intel Labs until 2011, when she began as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley.^[6] In recent years, Ratnasamy has focused her research on programmable networks including the RouteBricks software router and pioneering work in Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).^[7] In 2016, she co-founded Nefeli Networks to commercialize NFV technologies.^[8]

Her father is noted chemist Paul Ratnasamy.^{[citation needed]}

• Grace Murray Hopper Award^[1]
• Sloan Fellowship
• ACM SIGCOMM Test-of-Time Award (2011)^[9]
• ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award (2017)^[10]