Laurie Hendren

Laurie Hendren (December 13, 1958 – May 27, 2019) was a Canadian computer scientist noted for her research in programming languages and compilers, and for her advocacy for patients to have access to their health data in Quebec.

Biography Hendren received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in computer science from Queen's University, Kingston in 1982 and 1984 respectively. She received a Ph.D in computer science from Cornell University in 1990.

She then joined the School of Computer Science at the McGill University as an assistant professor in 1990. While there she was promoted to associate professor in 1995 and full professor in 2001. She also served as Associate Dean (Academic) for the Faculty of Science at McGill University from 2005 to 2014. In 2014, she became the 5 of diamonds in the Notable Women of Computing card deck.

Awards and notable achievements Hendren was awarded the Leo Yaffe Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Faculty of Science at McGill University and has been the program chair of the Association for Computing Machinery SIGPLAN Programming Language Design and Implementation Conference.

In 2019, Hendren was awarded the senior AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize, but died before the ECOOP conference at which the prize is usually awarded. It was thus awarded posthumously.

Research projects Hendren has led or co-led several big open source research projects at McGill University. These are: Soot: a framework for analyzing and transforming Java and Android Applications SableVM: an open implementation of a Java virtual machine abc: the AspectBench Compiler for AspectJ McLab: compiler tools for array-based languages OHIG: The Opal Health Informatics Group that built and operated the Opal patient portal, the first patient portal in a hospital in Quebec