Mary Lou Soffa

in Mathematics from University of Pittsburgh with honors magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

She then joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh as an assistant professor in 1977.

She served as Dean of Graduate Studies of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1990 to 1995.

She has directed 32 graduate students to completion, half of whom are women and two are minorities.

In 2012[1] she received the ACM-IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy Award at SC12, the international conference on high-performance computing.