As a recovering academic who is also a minority, I thought I’d join in with the Finding Ada crowd today. I have two prominent women in computer science research I was fortunate enough to know on a first name basis. Susan L. Graham and Valerie Taylor. They both deserve their own posts, so I’ll start with Sue.
Susan Graham was on my dissertation committee at UC Berkeley. She and her husband, Michael Harrison my direct advisor, led the Ensemble research project which funded a lot of my time there. Sue was my introduction to the overworked professor’s two word e-mail response. I fondly remember her penchant for correcting itsos in my writing. When I got to Berkeley, I was sort of naive and ignorant. I really had no idea who she was, although she had been publishing for over a decade. Then again I wasn’t really a compiler geek at that point. But when I saw that she was the Graham in Graham-Glanville generator, prominently mentioned in The (Green) Dragon Book, then I knew she was a world-class researcher. If you are a young female academic in computing, Sue helped pave the way for you.
Here’s her bio from the UC Berkeley EECS web site:
She received an A.B. in mathematics from Harvard University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was the founding editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. In 2000 she received the ACM SIGPLAN Career Programming Language Achievement Award. She has served on numerous advisory committees; among them, the U.S. President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). She served as the Chief Computer Scientist for the NSF-sponsored National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) from 1997 to 2005. Recently she co-chaired a National Research Council study on the Future of Supercomputing. She is President of the Harvard Board of Overseers.
She is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Emerita at the UC Berkeley. Her research spans many aspects of programming language implementation, software tools, software development, environments, and high-performance computing. As a participant in the Berkeley Unix project, she and her students built the Berkeley Pascal system and the widely used program profiling tool gprof. Their paper on that tool was selected for the list of best papers from twenty years of the Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (1979-1999).
Uh, yeah.
This also doesn’t mention the fact that for a long while, she was the only female faculty member in the UC Berkeley CS Division.