The New York Academy of Sciences
eBriefing 
STEM Supreme: Barbara Liskov
Reported by
Posted July 15, 2021
Presented By
In this third episode of the webinar series STEM Supremes: Conversations with Women in Science, the Academy’s Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Brooke Grindlinger, interviewed pioneering computer scientist and MIT professor, Dr. Barbara H. Liskov. Every modern computer programming language has ideas in it that can be traced back to programming languages CLU and Argus, designed by Liskov. Every time you exchange email with a friend, check your bank statement online or run a Google search, you are riding the momentum of her research. Widely credited as one of the first women in the United States to be awarded a PhD from a computer science department, she was named one of the 50 most important women in science by Discover magazine and received the 2008 A.M. Turing Award, considered by many to be the Nobel Prize of computer science. Her focus on faculty diversity and gender issues, including the recruitment, retention, promotion and career development of minorities and women, is not just preparing them to enter the tech sector workforce, but preparing them to lead it.
In this eBriefing, You’ll Learn:
- Basic concepts in computer language programming, including: modularity, partitions, Viewstamped Replication, Byzantine failures, and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance
- Origin of the computer programming language, CLU
- The importance of assessing company/institutional ‘culture’ during one’s job search
- Effective institutional strategies for reducing bias and enhancing equity, to meet the needs of women in STEM careers
- Strategies to enhance student diversity and inclusion in computer science
STEM Supremes: In Conversation with Barbara Liskov
Moderator/Speakers
Moderator: Brooke Grindlinger, PhD
New York Academy of Sciences
Speaker: Barbara Liskov, PhD
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
A full transcript of this conversation is available for download here.
Barbara Liskov, PhD
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dr. Liskov is the Ford Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she has taught since 1972. Liskov is perhaps best known for her seminal work on data abstraction—a fundamental tool for organizing computer programs. Her research in the early 1970s led to the design and implementation of CLU, the first programming language to support data abstraction. A member of the IEEE and the US National Academy of Engineering, Dr. Liskov is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Association for Computing Machinery. She received the 2004 IEEE John von Neumann Medal and the Association of Computer Machinery's 2008 A.M. Turing Award.
Brooke Grindlinger, PhD
New York Academy of Sciences
Read more about Dr. Grindlinger, the Academy’s Chief Scientific Officer, here.