Alumni spotlight: Mary Lou Soffa
After being recruited by a number of other universities during her outstanding academic career, Professor Mary Lou Soffa finally succumbed to an offer — a very attractive offer. She decided to leave her faculty position in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh, effective September of 2004, to assume the roles of Owen R. Cheatham Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Virginia.
In 1977, Mary Lou earned her PhD in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh. She then accepted a position on the faculty of Pitt's CS Department and remained there for twenty-seven years. During that time period, she achieved excellence in each of the three traditional areas in which faculty performance is evaluated: research, teaching, and service.
In her chosen specialty of programming languages, she became a leading researcher. Her research interests have particularly focused on optimizing and parallelizing compilers, program analysis, and software tools for debugging and testing programs. In recent years, her work has included development of a unifying framework for optimizations, usable for determining their important properties, especially their profitability. That framework includes code, optimization and resource models for systematically exploring the application of optimizations. It is expected to provide both analytical and experimental models for understanding, predicting, and verifying the properties of optimizations, such as performance impact and interactions. Also included are practical and automatic strategies for driving the application of optimizations based on the models. By utilizing the model-based strategies, the goal is to enable optimizing compilers to produce higher-quality code and to employ different paradigms than those currently in use.
Mary Lou developed a remarkable record of high-quality research projects, sustained by substantial grant support from a variety of funding sources. In so doing, she proved herself to be a very good collaborator and team player. This fact is confirmed by her many jointly-authored papers and grant awards. She makes sure that her graduate students as well as other faculty with whom she collaborates get due credit for their contributions. It is apparent from her many research projects that, in addition to focusing on her primary specialty, her orientation also encompasses various multi-disciplinary objectives.
Graduate students have always been partial to her. At Pitt she advised more PhD students than anyone else in our department. Among her advisees have been many of our women PhD recipients and a number of the best students this department has produced. Her outstanding qualities as a mentor were recognized nationally in 1999 when she received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring.
Mary Lou is also very good in the classroom. While the undergraduate- and graduate-level courses she teaches are rigorous and demanding, she lectures clearly and knowledgeably and provides a lot of support that her students appreciate. As a result, she has won several departmental teaching awards based on scores she achieved in student evaluations of her teaching.
With regard to departmental service during her years at Pitt, Mary Lou was always a stalwart citizen. In interactions with faculty, she was a constructive, strong-minded participant. She expressed her views honestly and candidly, thereby exerting a lot of influence (on a faculty that is predominantly male). She is one of those faculty members who could always be relied upon
1. To care deeply about the Department, its functioning, and its welfare,
2. To express opinions on both the good and bad characteristics of the department and to offer suggestions on those matters and
3. To contribute significantly to the Department by agreeing to take on time-consuming administrative roles and then making sure that they were performed satisfactorily.
For any department chair, it is both a delight and a relief to have faculty like her to call and count on. Now we can only hope that she, in serving as a department chair herself, will have such dependable faculty members to support her.
After accepting a range of departmental roles that gave her much visibility at Pitt, Mary Lou was selected to serve as Dean of Graduate Studies in 1991, thereby also gaining higher-level administrative experience in the University. During her five years in that position, she not only had the opportunity to formulate and pursue her vision of how Pitt's graduate school could and should be improved; she exhibited considerable interpersonal skills in undergirding the efforts she expended toward attaining her goals.
Mary Lou had to deal with other deans, about 35 department chairs and program directors, and other high-level Pitt administrators. She clearly demonstrated her ability to lead. During regular meetings of the University Council of Deans and in direct interactions with the other FAS leaders, she made her points forcefully and achieved solid results. Furthermore, and consistent with her strong record of attracting, advising, and nurturing graduate students in our CS Department, her efforts as an advocate on behalf of all Arts & Sciences graduate students (e.g. recruiting more women and minority students into graduate school, providing better services for graduate students, reducing TA/TF workloads, combating sexual harassment, etc.) became a noteworthy trademark of her tenure as Graduate Dean.
Regarding her professional activities, she became very prominent on the national and international scene through her leadership roles in the CRA, CRA-W, ACM SIGSOFT, ACM SIGPLAN; and as conference chair, program chair, or program committee member for numerous conferences in her specialty. Throughout, she has avidly pursued the goal of improving the status of women in computer science.
In recognition of her outstanding contributions to the field, she was elected an ACM Fellow in 1999. This is a distinct honor for a computer scientist.
After setting goals for herself, Mary Lou pursues them with diligence, perseverance, and strong convictions. She is very conscientious and can always be expected to do more than her fair share of the myriad of tasks that need to be carried out by an academic researcher, teacher, and leader, especially one who aspires to excel beyond the norm. During her time at Pitt, Mary Lou certainly exhibited an admirable formula for what it takes to become very successful.
Mary Lou has been a valued colleague and an invaluable contributor to the achievements and functioning of the CS Department at Pitt. It is a great loss to Pitt to see her leave after 27 years. While we regret that she decided to depart and we shall miss her greatly, we are very happy for her and wish her only the best as she faces new opportunities and challenges. We are confident that she will continue to excel and make all of us at the University of Pittsburgh, her home base, proud of her!
Siegfried Treu, February 2005