Susan L. Graham

Co-builder of the Berkeley Pascal system and the widely used program profiling tool Gprof, Graham is an American computer scientist who has served as the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Computer Science Division of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Her chair was endowed by Pehong Chen, President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Broadvision. Graham's research has spanned many aspects of programming language implementation, software tools, software development environments, and high-performance computing.

As a participant in the Berkeley Unix project, she and her students built the Berkeley Pascal system and the widely used program profiling tool gprof. Gprof is a performance analysis tool for Unix applications. It uses a hybrid of instrumentation and sampling and was created as an extended version of the older "prof" tool. Unlike prof, Gprof is capable of limited call graph collecting and printing.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she received her A.B. degree in Mathematics from Harvard in 1964, her M.S. degree in 1966, and her Ph.D. in 1971, both the M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University in Stanford, California. In 1971 Graham joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, rising from Assistant Professor through Associate Professor from 1976 to 1981, and then to full Professor in 1981.

Her research projects included Harmonia—a language-based framework for interactive software development—and Titanium—a Java-based parallel programming language, compiler, and runtime system. She has published dozens of research articles in industry publications dating back to 1968, including the Journal of the ACM, and has lectured and published extensively on subjects in computer languages, compilers, and programming environments.

In 1994 Graham was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the IEEE, as well as a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2004, her paper on Gprof appeared on the list of the 50 most influential PLDI papers of all time, as one of four papers from 1982.

In 2009, she was awarded the IEEE John von Neumann Medal for "contributions to programming language design and implementation and for exemplary service to the discipline of computer science." On Sept. 29, 2011, it was announced that Graham had been chosen to receive the ACM-IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy Award on November 15, 2011, in Seattle at SC11, the International Conference on High-Performance Computing, "For foundational compilation algorithms and programming tools; research and discipline leadership; and exceptional mentoring."