Barbara Liskov (born November 7, 1939 as Barbara Jane Huberman) is an American computer scientist who has made pioneering contributions to programming languages and distributed computing. Her notable work includes the development of the Liskov substitution principle which describes the fundamental nature of data abstraction, and is used in type theory (see subtyping) and in object-oriented programming (see inheritance). Her work was recognized with the 2008 Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science. Liskov is one of the earliest women to have been granted a doctorate in computer science in the United States, and the second woman to receive the Turing award. She is currently an Institute Professor and Ford Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Early life and education Liskov was born November 7, 1939, in Los Angeles, California, to a Jewish family, the eldest of Jane (née Dickhoff) and Moses Huberman's four children. She earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics with a minor in physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. At Berkeley, she had only one other female classmate in her major. She applied to graduate mathematics programs at Berkeley and Princeton. At the time Princeton was not accepting female students in mathematics. She was accepted at Berkeley but instead moved to Boston and began working at Mitre Corporation, where she became interested in computers and programming. She worked at Mitre for one year before taking a programming job at Harvard working on language translation. She then decided to go back to school and applied again to Berkeley, but also to Stanford and Harvard. In March 1968 she became one of the first women in the United States to be awarded a Ph.D. from a computer science department when she was awarded her degree from Stanford University. At Stanford, she worked with John McCarthy and was supported to work in artificial intelligence. The topic of her Ph.D. thesis was a computer program to play chess endgames for which she developed the important killer heuristic. Career After graduating from Stanford, Liskov returned to Mitre to work as research staff. Liskov has led many significant projects, including the Venus operating system, a small, low-cost timesharing system; the design and implementation of CLU; Argus, the first high-level language to support implementation of distributed programs and to demonstrate the technique of promise pipelining; and Thor, an object-oriented database system. With Jeannette Wing, she developed a