Lynn Conway.pdf

Lynn Conway is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Emerita, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She earned her BS and MSEE at Columbia University and made foundational contributions to computer architecture at IBM, but was fired in 1968 due to her gender transition. Conway restarted her career, inventing scalable design rules for VLSI chip design and authoring the seminal Mead-Conway text, and pioneered the teaching of these methods. Her work launched a revolution in VLSI microchip design and she invented an internet-based e-commerce infrastructure for rapid chip prototyping. Conway held various positions, including Assistant Director for Strategic Computing at DARPA, and Professor of EECS at the University of Michigan. She came out as transgender via the internet and created a major advocacy website, and has received numerous awards and honors, including Fellow of the IEEE and the 2015 James Clerk Maxwell Medal.