Barbara Liskov, the first woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. from a computer-science department and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been awarded the A.M. Turing Award for 2008.
Ms. Liskov was chosen for the $250,000 prize, given by the Association for Computing Machinery, for her contributions to the computer programs that “form the infrastructure of our information-based society,” an association statement said. In addition to laying the groundwork for the development of the modern search engine, Ms. Liskov was instrumental in demonstrating how “data abstraction,” a method for organizing complex programs, could make software more accessible and reliable, the statement said.
Ms. Liskov earned her doctorate from Stanford University’s computer-science department in 1968. —David Shieh
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