Maria Klawe

Maria Margaret Klawe, born in Toronto in 1951, is a Canadian-American computer scientist with a doctorate in mathematics whose career has moved between research, university leadership and advocacy for women in technical fields. She took her bachelor's degree and her 1977 doctorate in mathematics at the University of Alberta, then began a second doctorate in computer science at the University of Toronto before accepting a faculty post there. She spent eight years at IBM's Almaden Research Center, where she managed its discrete mathematics group, and then joined the University of British Columbia, serving as head of computer science and later dean of science. She was dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University and, from 2006 to 2023, the fifth president of Harvey Mudd College. Her best-cited research concerns geometric optimization algorithms, distributed leader election and the art gallery problem, and she is a co-inventor of the SMAWK matrix-searching algorithm. She served as president of the Association for Computing Machinery from 2002 to 2004.