#SheIsWhyICode Women’s History Month – Frances Allen

SIGUCCS Commuity

Frances E Allen (1932 – present)

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In 2006, Frances became the first woman to receive ACM’s Turing Award. She was also the first female IBM Fellow. She joined IBM in 1957 after working as a teacher and earning her master’s degree in mathematics. She planned to return to teaching once her student loans were paid off, but ended up staying with IBM for her entire 45 year career.  She is known for leading developments in the field of optimizing compilers. She is recognized for her accomplishments in development of compilers, parallelization and code optimization. She also played a role in intelligence work on programming languages as well as security codes for The National Security Agency (NSA).

For more information, visit https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/allen_1012327.cfm

During Women’s History Month this March, ACM is encouraging computing professionals and students to use the hashtag #SheIsWhyICode to share stories of women in computing who have inspired them at any point in their career or education. The stories might range in topic from one’s earliest introduction to computer science to overcoming a recent professional obstacle, and the subjects could vary from luminaries of the computing field to someone’s high school computer science teacher or current boss.

About SIGUCCS Editor

The Special Interest Group on University and College Computing Services (SIGUCCS) is an association of professionals who support and manage the diverse aspects of information technology services at higher education institutions. SIGUCCS is one of 36 special interest groups of ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. SIGUCCS focuses on issues surrounding the support, delivery, and management of those services, and provides professional development opportunities for its members and the other individuals in the field.