[1] She was a member of the successful first all-women team to climb Annapurna, but was killed along with her partner Alison Chadwick-Onyszkiewicz while preparing to attempt the unclimbed central summit of the mountain.
[1] She was initially active in machine translation, before moving into database management system design.
She worked on System R, which was the first implementation of SQL, a standardised database query language which has since become a dominant standard.
[3][4] She took a leave without pay to make the solo attempt on Aconcagua, and then again for the expedition to Annapurna.
[3] She was married to John McCarthy, a pioneer in the discipline of artificial intelligence and creator of the Lisp programming language.