Mary Shaw (computer scientist)

Mary Shaw is an American software engineer and the Alan J. Perlis Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, known for her work on software architecture. Born in Washington, D.C. in 1943, she took her bachelor's degree at Rice University and her doctorate in computer science at Carnegie Mellon in 1972, after working as a systems programmer at the Research Analysis Corporation. She joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1972 and served as Chief Scientist of the Software Engineering Institute from 1984 to 1987, Associate Dean for Professional Education from 1992 to 1999 and Co-Director of the Sloan Software Industry Center from 2001 to 2006. With David Garlan she wrote Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline, published in 1996, which describes the architecture of a system as a collection of computational components together with the connectors that describe their interactions. Shaw and Garlan received the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award in 2011, and Shaw received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, named in 2012 and presented by President Obama on October 3, 2014.