Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov (born Barbara Huberman, November 7, 1939), is a prominent computer scientist. She is currently the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her BA in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961, and became the first woman in the United States to be awarded a PhD in Computer Science, in 1968 from Stanford University. Most universities did not have Computer Science departments at that time and Stanford's was strictly limited to graduate students.

Barbara Liskov has led many significant projects, including the design and implementation of CLU, the first programming language to support data abstraction; Argus, the first high-level language to support implementation of distributed programs; and Thor, an object-oriented database system. With Jeannette Wing, she developed a particular definition of subtyping, commonly known as the Liskov substitution principle. She leads the Programming Methodology Group at MIT, with a current research focus in Byzantine Fault Tolerance and distributed computing.

Professor Liskov is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2004 she won the John von Neumann Medal for "fundamental contributions to programming languages, programming methodology, and distributed systems." She is the author of three books and over a hundred technical papers.