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25 May 1995

Mary Shaw, Professor and Software Engineering Expert, Is Awarded The Perlis Chair in Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science

PITTSBURGH--Mary M. Shaw, professor of computer science and associate dean for professional programs in the School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University, has been awarded the Perlis Chair, an endowed professorship established in 1991 in SCS.

The Perlis chair was created in memory of Alan J. Perlis, one of the founders of Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science Department, a pioneer in programming language development and an extraordinary educator. Perlis was a Carnegie Mellon alumnus, former Mathematics Department chairman and one-time head of the university's computation center. In 1966, he was chosen to be the first recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Turing Award, which remains the highest honor in computing.

Shaw has been chosen for the Perlis chair in recognition of her significant accomplishments in software research and education. She has focused her attention in the areas of programming systems and software engineering, particularly software architecture, programming languages, specifications and abstraction techniques. She has spoken out on the need for a true engineering discipline for software, and wrote a seminal paper, "Prospects for an Engineering Discipline of Software," published in IEEE Software in 1990. She sees the architecture of software systems--the inter-module relations that determine the character of a system in contrast to the intra-module definitions that deal with algorithms and data structures--as "the next important area of leverage in software development."

Shaw helped to design the curriculum for SCS' undergraduate computer science program. She led the restructuring of the university's Master of Software Engineering program to focus on the technical engineering side of the discipline. In the '70s she did research on abstract data types, one of the two roots of object-oriented programming.

She earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics cum laude from Rice University in 1965. She received her Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon in 1971 and joined the university faculty, becoming an assistant professor in 1972. She was named a senior research computer scientist in 1977 and became an associate professor in 1982. She became a full professor in 1986. From 1984-1987, she also held the title of chief scientist of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and still holds a joint appointment at the SEI. She has been associate dean for professional programs since 1992, and in 1994 became a charter member of the university's Human Computer Interaction Institute.

In 1993, Shaw received the Warnier Prize for contributions to software engineering and system development methods. She is an author or editor of six books and more than 100 papers and technical reports. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a member of the ACM, the New York Academy of Sciences and the Society of the Sigma Xi.


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