Jeannette Wing is the vice president, head of Microsoft Research International, and assumes responsibility for Microsoft Research’s research laboratories in Bangalore, India; Beijing, China; and Cambridge, UK.

Wing has held key positions in both academia and government, most recently at Carnegie Mellon University and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

From 2007 to 2010, Wing served as assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation, where she led the directorate that funds academic computer science research in the United States. In this capacity, she worked with NSF staff to set funding priorities for the academic science and engineering research community, create new programs, and represent the nation’s computer science community. Wing has served twice as head of the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University: before her term at NSF and again upon her return to Carnegie Mellon. She was also associate dean for Academic Affairs at Carnegie Mellon for five years, overseeing the educational programs offered by the School of Computer Science.

Her areas of expertise are in trustworthy computing, formal methods, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. Her research contributions include work on the Larch family of specification languages; programming language support for atomic objects in distributed transactions; with Dr. Maurice Herlihy, the notion of linearizability, a correctness condition for concurrent objects; and with Dr. Barbara Liskov, a semantics for behavioral subtyping. Her contributions in security and privacy include work on attack graphs and attack surfaces, work on formalizing privacy policies for automated compliance checking, and work on trust in networks of humans and computers.

Within the computer science community, Wing is well-known for her advocacy of “computational thinking,” an approach to problem solving, designing systems and understanding human behavior that draws upon concepts fundamental to computer science. She sees it as a “universally applicable attitude and skill set that everyone, not just computer scientists, should be eager to learn and use.” Wing has also served as the founder and director of the Center for Computational Thinking at Carnegie Mellon.

Wing was on the faculty at the University of Southern California for two years before joining the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. As a student, she worked at Bell Laboratories and Xerox PARC. She has spent sabbaticals at MIT and MSR Redmond. Wing received the CRA Distinguished Service Award in 2011 and the SIGSOFT Retrospective Paper Award in 2012. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.

Wing received her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.