Kathleen Fisher

Kathleen Shanahan Fisher is an American computer scientist who specializes in programming languages and their implementation.

Fisher is CEO of ARIA and an adjunct professor at Tufts University. She is one of the authors of the PADS data description language and the Moby experimental concurrent programming language. She is a past Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) and has chaired three of their major conferences, ICFP in 2004, OOPSLA in 2011, and PLDI in 2019. She co-founded SIGPLAN’s Programming Language Mentoring Workshop (PLMW) Series in an effort to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities in computer science and was co-chair of the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women for three years. In 2010, she was elected as an ACM Fellow "for contributions to programming language design, theory, and practice, and for service to the computing community." She is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Harvey Mudd College.

Early life and education Fisher was born in 1969 in San Marino, California. Her father was an investment professional and her mother worked peripatetically in engineering, providing an example "that women could do math, science, or anything else we put out mind to. She graduated from San Marino High School before attending Stanford University. Interested in the material, she took another class and came across the halting problem. She found the proof behind it simple yet elegant, and the experience marked a turning point in her interest in computer science. A Hertz Fellow during the tenure of her graduate work,

Career After graduation Fisher started working at AT&T Labs Research. This program was a huge success and has since been transitioned to more complex vehicles such as Boeing’s Unmanned Little Bird.

Honors and awards Fisher has received many honors, including: 2013: SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award 2012: Distinguished PLDI Paper 2012: SIGPLAN CACM Research Highlights Nominated Paper 2011: PLDI Best Paper Award 2010: ACM Fellow 2008: SIGPLAN CACM Research Highlights Nominated Paper 2007: ACM Distinguished Scientist 2000: Best Research Paper Award, KDD 1996: NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, declined. 1996: The University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, declined. 1995: Student Service Award, Stanford Computer Science Department 1994–1996: Hertz Foundation Fellowship 1993: Finch Fellowship 1991–1994: NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Personal life Fisher, in part, credits her daughter's birth, concurrent with her Ph.D. work at Stanford, with prompting the "focus" needed to complete her graduate work in a timely and effective manner.