She has also founded organisations for women in computer science and created affirmative action programs to support students in the field.
Her parents separated soon after she was born, so she moved around frequently as a child with stints in Oklahoma, California, Texas and Indiana.
She received her undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Houston with the intention of training as a math teacher.
[3] During her studies at Berkeley, she began working with Michael Stonebraker on the INGRES project where she was a key contributor.
[1] Hawthorn went on to work at Hewlett-Packard as a manager and then at a database startup Britton-Lee, where she became Vice President of Engineering.
She integrated Andromedia technology with Unicenter TNG[11] and donated software systems to UC Berkeley.
[1] She met and married her second husband, Mike Ubell, during her Ph.D.[1] Hawthorn was involved in the search for Jim Gray, a computer scientist who went missing when sailing off the coast of California.
[18] Hawthorn has a history of activism and advocacy, starting with civil rights protests in her undergrad days.
[1] By this time, computer science had started to become more recognised as an engineering field with limited spaces and funding in university programs, neither of which were readily available to women.