Andrea Suzanne LaPaugh is an American computer scientist and professor emerita of computer science at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...

. Her research has concerned the

design and analysis of algorithms In computer science, the analysis of algorithms is the process of finding the computational complexity of algorithms—the amount of time, storage, or other resources needed to execute them. Usually, this involves determining a function that re ...

, particularly for

graph algorithm The following is a list of well-known algorithms along with one-line descriptions for each. Automated planning Combinatorial algorithms General combinatorial algorithms * Brent's algorithm: finds a cycle in function value iterations using on ...

s, problems involving the computer-aided design of

VLSI Very large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when MOS integrated circuit (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) ...

circuits, and

document retrieval Document retrieval is defined as the matching of some stated user query against a set of free-text records. These records could be any type of mainly unstructured text, such as newspaper articles, real estate records or paragraphs in a manual. Us ...

Early life and education

LaPaugh is originally from

Middletown, Connecticut Middletown is a city located in Middlesex County, Connecticut, United States, Located along the Connecticut River, in the central part of the state, it is south of Hartford. In 1650, it was incorporated by English settlers as a town under it ...

, where her father worked in an office and her mother was a librarian; she majored in physics at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to ...

. This was at a time when Cornell had no undergraduate computer science program, but she became interested in computer science through courses on

mathematical logic Mathematical logic is the study of formal logic within mathematics. Major subareas include model theory, proof theory, set theory, and recursion theory. Research in mathematical logic commonly addresses the mathematical properties of formal ...

and

formal language In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language consists of words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules. The alphabet of a formal language consists of s ...

s, with instructors including

Anil Nerode Anil Nerode (born 1932) is an American mathematician. He received his undergraduate education and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, the latter under the directions of Saunders Mac Lane. He enrolled in the Hutchins College at t ...

Juris Hartmanis Juris Hartmanis (July 5, 1928 – July 29, 2022) was a Latvian-born American computer scientist and computational theorist who, with Richard E. Stearns, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award "in recognition of their seminal paper which establishe ...

, and

John Hopcroft John Edward Hopcroft (born October 7, 1939) is an American theoretical computer scientist. His textbooks on theory of computation (also known as the Cinderella book) and data structures are regarded as standards in their fields. He is the IBM ...

. She began her doctoral studies at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

in 1974, working with

Ron Rivest Ronald Linn Rivest (; born May 6, 1947) is a cryptographer and an Institute Professor at MIT. He is a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Int ...

on graph algorithms, and finished her Ph.D. there in 1980 with the dissertation ''Algorithms for Integrated Circuit Layout: An Analytic Approach''.

Career and later life

LaPaugh worked for a year as a visiting assistant professor at Brown University before joining the Princeton University faculty as an assistant professor in 1981, at first as the only female engineering faculty member and, after earning tenure in 1987, as the only tenured woman in engineering. She was promoted to full professor in 1995, and was the

master Master or masters may refer to: Ranks or titles * Ascended master, a term used in the Theosophical religious tradition to refer to spiritually enlightened beings who in past incarnations were ordinary humans *Grandmaster (chess), National Master ...

Forbes College The Malcolm S. Forbes Jr. '70 College is one of the six residential colleges that house all freshmen and sophomores at Princeton University. The College was a gift to the school by Malcolm S. Forbes Sr. '41 in 1984 in honor of his son, Steve ...

at Princeton from 2000 to 2004. She retired to become a

professor emerita ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

in 2019.

Selected publications

* * * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lapaugh, Andrea Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer scientists American women computer scientists Theoretical computer scientists Cornell University alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Princeton University faculty 21st-century American women