Faith Ellen (formerly known as Faith E. Fich) is a professor of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...

who studies distributed

data structure In computer science, a data structure is a data organization, management, and storage format that is usually chosen for efficient access to data. More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships among them, a ...

s and the theory of

distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different computer network, networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by message passing, passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed com ...

. She earned her bachelor's degree and masters from the University of Waterloo in 1977 and 1978, respectively, and doctorate in 1982 from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

under the supervision of Richard Karp; her dissertation concerned

lower bound In mathematics, particularly in order theory, an upper bound or majorant of a subset of some preordered set is an element of that is greater than or equal to every element of . Dually, a lower bound or minorant of is defined to be an element ...

s for

cycle detection In computer science, cycle detection or cycle finding is the algorithmic problem of finding a cycle in a sequence of iterated function values. For any function that maps a finite set to itself, and any initial value in , the sequence of itera ...

and

parallel Parallel is a geometric term of location which may refer to: Computing * Parallel algorithm * Parallel computing * Parallel metaheuristic * Parallel (software), a UNIX utility for running programs in parallel * Parallel Sysplex, a cluster of IBM ...

prefix sums. She joined the faculty of the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

in 1983, and moved to Toronto in 1986. From 1997 to 2001, she was the vice chair of SIGACT, the leading international society for theory of computation. From 2006 to 2009, she was chair of the steering committee for PODC, a top international conference for theory of distributed computing. In 2014, she also co-authored the book, ''Impossibility Results for Distributed Computing''. She became a

Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

in 2014.ACM Names Fellows for Innovations in Computing
, ACM, January 8, 2015, retrieved 2015-01-08.

References

Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer scientists Canadian computer scientists Canadian women computer scientists Theoretical computer scientists Researchers in distributed computing University of California, Berkeley alumni University of Toronto faculty University of Washington faculty Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery {{compu-scientist-stub