Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov joined MITRE in 1961 as an applications programmer, where she discovered a love of computer programming. After a year at MITRE, she left to work a programming job at Harvard University, and then went on to earn a doctorate from Standford University, becoming one of the first American women to earn a Ph.D. in computer science.

She then returned to MITRE, working in the Information Processing Systems department. Her research mainly focused on software systems, and she led many significant projects in this field, including the Venus operating system. This was an experimental multiprogramming system which supported several users concurrently—an innovation at the time. She also worked on projects related to solving the “software crisis,” or difficulties encountered in developing large, complex systems in the 1960s and 1970s, and which often caused many large-scale, expensive software development projects to fail.

In 1972 she left MITRE to join MIT’s faculty as a professor in the Laboratory for Computer Science. There, she developed the CLU and Argus programming languages, as well as the Liskov Substitution Principle. For her decades of work in computer sciences, she has won numerous awards and accolades, including the John von Neumann Medal and the Turing Award.

Public Release #23-03271-5