Nancy G. Leveson - Steering Committee member, Academic-systers
Department of Aeronautica and Astronautics, MIT

Nancy Leveson received all her degrees, in math, management, and computer science, from UCLA (Ph.D. 1980) and spent her formative years being a Computer Science professor at the University of California, Irvine. Moving to Seattle in 1993 in search of rain, she was Boeing Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. She presently resides at MIT in her continual search for worse weather and new fields to conquer.

Professor Leveson started a new area of research, software safety, which is concerned with the problems of building software for real-time systems where failures can result in loss of life or property. She and her students produced a formal requirements specification for TCAS II, a real collision-avoidance system required on all commercial aircraft in U.S. airspace. The FAA adopted it as their official specification.



Susan Owicki - CRA-W Women's Database(WDB)
Strategic Technologies and Architectural Research Laboratory
InterTrust Technologies Corporation

Susan Owicki is Associate Director of the Strategic Technologies and Architectural Research Laboratory (STAR Lab) at InterTrust Technologies Corporation, the first laboratory devoted to research in digital rights management and related electronic commerce technologies. Dr. Owicki's research interests include distributed systems, performance analysis, and trusted systems for electronic commerce. Dr. Owicki is a Fellow of the ACM.

Dr. Owicki received her Ph.D. from Cornell University. She subsequently spent a year on the faculty of Cornell's Computer Science department and then ten years as a faculty member in Stanford's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Departments. At Cornell and Stanford her research focused on parallel and distributed systems, program specification, and program verification. She then moved to Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center. Here her research emphasis shifted to performance measurement and modeling of parallel and distributed system, and she participated in the design of the AN2 network and Modula-3's distributed objects. Before joining InterTrust, she spent four years as an independent consultant. Her work during this period included the performance of interactive television and delivery of streaming video.

Dr. Owicki is married to Jack Owicki, an interdisciplinary scientist who consults for biotechnology firms. She has two teen-age children who specialize in theater and having fun with their friends. She is also in the process of acquiring a license as a Marriage and Family Therapist.