Teaching and Later Work at MIT

While working on all these fundamental ideas in computer science and object oriented programming Liskov was also supervising students' research and teaching various of MIT's flagship computer science courses where she also had significant impact. Referring to course 6.170 Liskov said 

So I developed this course ... about programming methodology, how do you do design, how do you use data abstraction, how do you do modular design. It was really in line with my interests, and I taught it for about – let me think, ’77 – probably 20-25 years, something like that. I to this day still get people telling me how important it was for them, what an impact it had on their career, because it really did teach the students how to think about modular design and how to organize a big project.

Originally called "Software Engineering", course 6.170, first was renamed Software Studio in 1993 and in 2013 became MIT OpenCourseWare. Her textbook, Program Development in Java: Abstraction, Specification, and Object-Oriented Design, MIT Press, 2000, co-authored with John Guttag is still available in a Kindle Version: 

At the time of gaining the 2008 Turing Award, Liskov was Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT, leading the Programming Methodology Group and in the same year was made an Institute professor by MIT, the most prestigious title that can be awarded to a faculty member. During he career at MIT she also fill admin roles. She was appointed Associate Provost of Faculty Equity in 2007 and from 2001 to 2004 she was Associate Head for Computer Science. During her three years in that position she hired five women after a long period in which no women had been found suitable to  join the faculty. 

Awards and Recognition

As well as the being a Fellow of the ACM and recipient of the 2008 Turing Award, Liksov's contributions have been repeatedly recognised. She received The Society of Women Engineers' Achievement Award in 1996,  the IEEE John von Neumann medal in 2004 and in 2008, she was awarded the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award.  She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. As we reported she won the Katayanagi Prize in Computer Science in 2011 and was one of the 2012 inductees to the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In 2018 she was honored with the IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award, presented to outstanding individuals whose main contribution to the concepts and development of the computer field was made at least fifteen years earlier. The citation reads:

“for pioneering data abstraction, polymorphism, and support for fault tolerance and distributed computing in the programming languages CLU and Argus.”

More Information

Laying the foundations of programming and system design

Barbara Liskov - A.M. Turing Award Laureate

CLU on Wikipedia

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