Liskov, Barbara

Barbara Liskov, née Barbara Jane Huberman, (born November 7, 1939, Los Angeles, California, U.S.), American computer scientist who won the 2008 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for her “pioneering work in the design of computer programming languages.”

After she earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1961 from the University of California, Berkeley, Liskov worked as a computer programmer in Massachusetts, first with the Mitre Corporation and then at Harvard University. Liskov returned to California in 1963, where she became a graduate assistant to John McCarthy and worked on his artificial intelligence projects at Stanford University. Liskov earned a master’s degree (1965) and a doctorate (1968) from Stanford, becoming the first woman to be granted a doctorate in computer science in the United States.

After graduating from Stanford, Liskov returned to the Mitre Corporation (1968–72) before joining the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she became the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering (1986–97), the Ford Professor of Engineering (1997– ), and an MIT Institute Professor (2008– ).

Liskov’s publications included Abstraction and Specification in Program Development (1986) and Program Development in Java: Abstraction, Specification, and Object-Oriented Design (2001), both in collaboration with John V. Guttag of MIT’s computer science department.