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.

[2][3] Liskov was born November 7, 1939, in Los Angeles, California,[4] the eldest of Jane (née Dickhoff) and Moses Huberman's four children.

[7] She was accepted at Berkeley but instead moved to Boston and began working at Mitre Corporation, where she became interested in computers and programming.

[7] The topic of her Ph.D. thesis was a computer program to play chess endgames for which she developed the important killer heuristic.

She leads the Programming Methodology Group at MIT, with a current research focus in Byzantine fault tolerance and distributed computing.

[17] She was awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa by the University of Lugano in 2011[18] and by Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in 2018.

[21] The ACM cited her contributions to the practical and theoretical foundations of "programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing".