She is a Ph.D. graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and spent her early career working as an IBM researcher.

Her main areas of research are compiler optimization, scheduling theory and algorithm analysis and design.

She attended Wellesley College for a year, before moving to California in 1959 to resume her undergraduate education at Berkeley.

[1] At the beginning of her junior year she gave birth to a daughter, Liz, and dropped out of Berkeley shortly thereafter to become a mother and a housewife.

[4] Simons transferred back to Berkeley for the remainder of graduate school, where she concentrated on studying scheduling theory and helped co-found the Women in Computer Science and Engineering club (WiCSE).

There, she worked on compiler optimization, algorithm analysis, and clock synchronization, which she won an IBM Research Division Award for.

Berkeley Engineering Fund, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and sits on the Advisory Boards of the Oxford Internet Institute.

[6] After leaving IBM and serving as ACM president, Simons began working to reverse the dangers of using unverifiable technology in voting.

[6] Barbara held one of her first public outcries of unverifiable voting technology in 2003 because election officials in Silicon Valley wanted to switch to paperless machines.

[14] She also co-chaired the ACM study of statewide databases of registered voters alongside Paula Hawthorn.

[17] In 2008 she was appointed by Senator Harry Reid to the U.S Election Assistance Commission Board of Advisors, where she contributed to "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA).