Nancy Lynch

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Nancy Lynch is the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She heads the Theory of Distributed Systems Group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Lynch is an expert on distributed algorithms and impossibility results for distributed systems and on formal modeling and verification of distributed systems.

During her Radcliffe fellowship year, she plans to work on her project “Biologically Inspired Distributed Algorithms.” The goal of this work is to convert insights about the behavior of biological systems into new and better techniques for designing computer systems.

Lynch is an ACM Fellow and a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. She has received a 2006 Van Wijngaarden Award, the 2007 Knuth Prize, a 2001 PODC Influential-Paper Award, a 2007 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing, the 2010 IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, and the 2012–2013 Athena Lecturer award. She has supervised more than 25 PhD students and 50 master’s students, as well as numerous postdoctoral research associates. She received her BS in mathematics from Brooklyn College in 1968 and her PhD in mathematics from MIT in 1972.