Jeannette Wing

Background Wing earned her S.B. and S.M. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in June 1979. Her advisers were Ronald Rivest and John Reiser. In 1983, she earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science at MIT under John Guttag.

Career and research Wing was on the faculty of the University of Southern California from 1982 to 1985 and then the faculty of Carnegie Mellon from 1985 to 2012. She served as the head of the Computer Science Department from 2004 to 2007 and from 2010 to 2012. In January 2013, she took a leave from Carnegie Mellon to work at Microsoft Research.

Wing has been a leading member of the formal methods community, especially in the area of Larch. She has led many research projects and has published widely.

With Barbara Liskov, she developed the Liskov substitution principle, published in 1993.

She has also been a strong promoter of computational thinking, expressing the algorithmic problem-solving and abstraction techniques used by computer scientists and how they might be applied in other disciplines. Wing was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 2003, "for contributions to methods for software systems". Wing was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2024, for "For formulation and advocacy of computational thinking, and for contributions to formal methods and trustworthy computing". Wing was featured in WomenTech Network's "100 Executive Women in Tech to Watch" list in 2025.