Jean Bacon

Born Sheffield, England 1942

Jean Bacon is a British Emeritus Professor of Distributed Systems at the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. She is retired but remains research-active. Jean was the first woman to be appointed to a Lectureship in the Computer Laboratory in 1985.

Before joining the Unviersity of Cambridge, Jean taught at Hatfield Technical College where, in the 1970s, she was involved in the design of one of the earliest computer science degree programs offered in the United Kingdom.

Jean became Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College and Director of Studies in Computer Science. Her research interests include Distributed systems, Concurrency control, Access control Information flow control, Software architecture and middleware for sensor-based applications such as transport, healthcare, and pollution monitoring. With Ken Moody she led the Opera research group from its creation in the 1990s.

Jean authored "Concurrent Systems" (published by Addison Wesley, 1st edition 1993, 2nd edition 1998), which in 2002/3 evolved into edition 3 for the Open University's "Software systems and their development" module (M301) and "Operating Systems: Concurrent and distributed software design" with Tim Harris (published by Addison Wesley, 2003).

She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of the Open University which was conferred in Ely cathedral on June 1st 2013. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the British Computer Society, was elected to the IEEE Computer Society's Board of Governors for 2002-2004 and 2005-200 and was founding Editor in Chief of IEEE Distributed Systems Online, which was extended from 2008 to become Computing Now. She is on the steering committees of ACM DEBS (Distributed Event-Based Systems), ACM Middleware and IEEE IC2E (Cloud Engineering).

The transcript of an interview conducted by Janet Abbate for the IEEE History Center, 10 April 2001 with Jean Bacon can be found here: http://ethw.org/Oral-History:Jean_Bacon.