Short Biography

Susan L. Graham is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Emerita at the University of California, 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). She has done seminal research in compiler code generation and optimization.  She and her students have built several interactive programming environments, yielding a variety of incremental analysis algorithms.  Her most recent projects were the Titanium system for language and compiler support of explicitly parallel programs and the Harmonia framework for high-level interactive software development.

 

Professor Graham 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.  Among her awards are 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), and the ACM/IEEE Ken Kennedy Award (2011).

 

She has served on numerous advisory committees. She was a member of the U.S. President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1997 to 2003.  She served as the Chief Computer Scientist for the NSF-sponsored National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) from 1997 to 2005.  She co-chaired a National Research Council study on the Future of Supercomputing.  She was a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers from 2001 to 2007 and was President in 2006-2007. She was vice-Chair and then Chair of the Council of the NSF-sponsored Computing Community Consortium. She currently serves as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), as a member of the Harvard Corporation, as the Vice-chair and Treasurer of the Board of Trustees of Cal Performances, and as a member of the Board of Overseers of the Curtis Institute of Music.

Last updated 06/2015