CSSA Fellowship Award goes to SET4W Committee Member

Professor Judith Bishop received the 2008 Computer Society of South Africa Fellowship Award (CSSA), an award made in recognition of achievement and a long-term commitment to the objectives of the Society. Having joined the Society in 1974, Prof Bishop is one of the longest-standing members of the Society. She has represented the Society internationally, having been elected chair of the International Federation of Information Processing’s (IFIP) working group on Software Implementation Technology for two terms and also serving as programme co-chair of the IFIP World Computer Congress held in Milan in September.

Most of Prof Bishop’s life has been spent contributing to the ICT sector, beginning as a member of the first SA group to study computer science in 1970. Since then she has remained at the front of her field of programming languages for distributed systems. She has contributed the community locally by organising conferences and summer schools, aimed at keeping postgraduates involved in cutting-edge research. Prof Bishop is also a member of Science, Engineering and Technology for Women (SET4W), an advisory committee of NACI; which aims to achieve greater equality between women and men by bringing a gender equity perspective into everyday science, engineering and technology policy-making.

She is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pretoria where she spends much of her time teaching undergraduate courses in programming languages, data structures and algorithms, and postgraduate courses in distributed systems, including high-performance computing. She is driven by a desire to push programming languages to their limits, in order to discover new ways of programming classic algorithms to gain readability, writeability, reliability and efficiency.

As someone who is widely travelled and well-known in the computer science community, and who has the ability to interact with scientists at all levels, it is not surprising that she has published some 90 papers, books and book chapters during her career.