Career
Previously, she taught at Hatfield Technical College where, in the 1970s, she was involved in the design of one of the earliest computer science degree programs offered in the United Kingdom. Bacon retired from her faculty position at Cambridge in 2010 but has continued to work on Opera projects related to distributed systems and security in cloud computing. Bacon was born in Sheffield in 1942 in a working-class family.
She received her Bachelor of Surgery in mathematics from University of London.
Her first introduction to computing came from a summer job in the early 1960s, after which she worked in computer-related jobs at the National Physical Laboratory and the General Electric Company Hirst Research Centre. In 1968 she transitioned to teaching in Higher National Certificate and Higher National Diploma programs while working on her Master of Science on a part-time basis.
She moved in 1973 to Hatfield – now the University of Hertfordshire – where she was involved in designing an early example of a degree program in computer science. In 1985 Bacon moved to a faculty position in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, where her work focused on the design of distributed systems and middleware.
She was the first woman to join the Computer Laboratory.
There she was a co-leader of the Opera Research Group since its founding in the 1990s. She has also published several textbooks on concurrent and distributed systems Bacon is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and of the British Computer Society.
She was the founding editor in chief of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers publication now known as Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Distributed Systems Online and served two terms on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Board of Governors from 2002-2004 and 2005-2007.
In 2013, she was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of the University by Open University.
