Research Areas

Biography

She is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Emerita at the UC Berkeley. She received an A.B. in mathematics from Harvard University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University. 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).

She is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and an Eminent Member of Eta Kappa Nu. She was the founding editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. Her honors include the ACM SIGPLAN Career Programming Language Achievement Award (2000), the ACM Distinguished Service Award (2006), the Harvard Medal (2008), the IEEE von Neumann Medal (2009), the Berkeley Citation (2009), the ACM/IEEE Ken Kennedy Award (2011), and the Computing Research Association Distinguished Service Award (2012). She was named a University of California Honored Woman of the CAL Community in 1995 and a Berkeley Fellow in 2011.

She has served on numerous advisory committees; among them, the U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), the Harvard Board of Overseers, the Curtis Institute of Music Board of Overseers, the Harvard Corporation, and the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). She served as the Chief Computer Scientist for the NSF-sponsored National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) from 1997 to 2005, and as Vice-Chair and then Chair of the NSF-sponsored Computing Community Consortium. She is co-Chair of the Board of Trustees of Cal Performances.

Selected Publications

Awards, Memberships and Fellowships