Lynn Conway

Lynn Conway (born 1938) is an American computer scientist and inventor. She is notable for several achievements, including the world-wide Mead & Conway VLSI design revolution, which she started with Carver Mead - a world-wide incubator of the emerging EDA industry. She worked at IBM in the 1960s and is credited with the invention of generalised dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by almost all modern processors to improve performance.

After learning of the pioneering research of Dr. Harry Benjamin in transgender treatment, she realized that she was a transsexual woman and that transition to a female gender role was possible. After suffering from severe depression over her situation, she contacted Dr. Benjamin, who agreed to counsel her and prescribe hormones. She had made an earlier transition attempt in the late 1950s that failed due to the medical climate at the time. Under Dr. Benjamin's care, she began preparing for her transition.

Although she hoped to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed to them that she was transsexual, and was planning on transitioning to a female gender role.

While living as a man, Conway had been married to a woman and had two children. After losing her IBM job and access to her children, she restarted her career from the ground up as a female, working as a contract programmer. She joined Xerox PARC in 1973, where she worked on VLSI design. With Carver Mead she co-authored Introduction to VLSI Systems, a groundbreaking work that would soon become a standard textbook.

In the early 1980s Conway worked for DARPA on strategic computing, and then became a Professor at the University of Michigan in 1985; in 1989, she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for her accomplishments in VLSI design.

After retiring from her professorship in December 1998, she decided to out herself as a transsexual woman again in 1999 after she realised that the story of her IBM work might soon come out. Since then, she has been a prominent spokesperson for rights of transsexual people. As part of that activism, she was a leader of a 2003 campaign against J. Michael Bailey which has been characterized as by her critics as academic harassment and intimidation. Bailey was ultimately cleared of all charges by the top-level investigation that she helped instigate.

In 2002, Conway married her husband, Charlie, with whom she had lived since 1988; as of 2006, they reside in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

External links

• Lynn Conway's website. Primarily written in English, but many articles are provided in other languages as well.