NSF taps Carnegie Mellon's Wing for high-level post

02.02.2007
The National Science Foundation has chosen Jeannette Wing, head of the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University, to lead its new Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate, effective July 1. She is an expert on security, trustworthy computing and formal methods in safety- and mission-critical systems.

Wing will oversee US$527 million in annual government spending on computer science and engineering, or about 86 percent of all such federal outlays.

Wing earned a PhD in computer science at MIT in 1983 and has worked or consulted for AT&T Bell Laboratories, Xerox Palo Alto Research Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corp., USC/Information Sciences Institute, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Microsoft Corp. Carnegie Mellon President Jared L. Cohon called her "one of the most original and creative scientists in computing today."

Wing has pioneered work in the area of formal methods -- the use of mathematical models and logics to specify and reason about computing systems. Since 2001, she has directed the university's Specification and Verification Center, which conducts research in formal methods and their applications to safety- and mission-critical systems.

In the area of "trustworthy computing," she has studied how system components not originally designed to work in concert can lead to surprising behavior when combined; she did work in that area during a sabbatical at Microsoft in 2003.

Wing coined the term "computational thinking," which posits that the basic tenets of computer science, and the methods used by computer scientists, can be broadly applied in fields outside of computer science.