Pamela Zave

Education

Zave graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor"s degree in English, in 1970.

Career

Already at that time she showed an interest in computer science, taking a summer computer programming job with J. C. Penney in 1969. She earned her doctorate in computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976, under the name Pamela Zave Smith. Her thesis, "Functional Equivalence of Parallel Processes", was supervised by Donald R. Fitzwater.

She taught at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1976 to 1981, and then joined Bell laboratories

She remained in the American Telephone & Telegraph Company part of the labs through the two corporate splits that formed Bellcore in 1984 and Lucent in 1996, and ended up working at American Telephone & Telegraph Company Labs, where she is currently a technology advisor in the Network Services Research Laboratory. She was elected as the secretary-treasurer of SIGSOFT for 1983–1985 and as vice-chair for 1985–1987.

She was program chair of the Second Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Symposium on Requirements Engineering in 1996, and co-chair of the Tenth International Formal Methods Europe Symposium in 2001. In 2009 she gave a keynote address at the International Conference on Software Engineering and in 2011 she gave a keynote address at the 9th Working Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture.

Zave"s brother, Derek A. Zave (1946–1987) was also a computer scientist

Zave is also an avid quilter.

Achievements

• In 2002 Zave was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for encouraging the use of formal methods in the development of telecommunication software through influential research, tool development, large case studies, and professional education". She was also selected as an American Telephone & Telegraph Company Fellow in 2009.