Portrait
Lynn Conway
Born
2 January 1938Mount Vernon, New York, USA
Died
9 June 2024Jackson, Michigan, USA · aged 86
Computer scientistUnited States

Lynn Conway

IBM fired her for transitioning in 1968 – she went on to revolutionise microchip design and became a role model for trans engineers.

Lynn Conway grew up in New York State and studied electrical engineering at Columbia University. In the 1960s she worked at IBM on a supercomputer project and invented a method for processors to execute instructions out of order – a principle used in almost every modern computer chip.

In 1968 she told IBM that she was going to transition. The company fired her. With her surgery completed, Conway started again from scratch under a new name, in secret, so that her past would not destroy her career.

At Xerox PARC in the 1970s she developed, together with Carver Mead, a new method for designing highly complex microchips. Their textbook “Introduction to VLSI Systems” (1980) and Conway’s courses changed the entire industry and helped make Silicon Valley possible. She later worked for the US defence research agency DARPA and from 1985 was a professor at the University of Michigan.

In 1999 she made her story public and became a prominent advocate for trans people, especially in science and technology. In 2020 IBM formally apologised to her. She died in Michigan in 2024, aged 86.

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