Mary Jane Irwin received her B.S. in Mathematics from Memphis State University in 1971, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois in 1975 and 1977, respectively. Her dissertation research on the topic of computer arithmetic was supervised by Dr. James Robertson.
Career
Mary Jane Irwin joined the faculty of the Pennsylvania State University as an assistant professor in 1977. She was promoted to the rank of full professor in 1989. Irwin has worked in the area of application-specific architectures, including the design, implementation, and field-testing of three different board level designs---the Arithmetic Cube, the MGAP and SPARTA. With her student Robert M. Owens they developed a suite of architecture, logic and circuit design tools including ARTIST, PERFLEX, LOGICIAN, and DECOMPOSER. In late 1993, Irwin worked in the area of resource constrained systems design including embedded systems that have limited battery life and limited memory space and sensor network systems that have extremely limited resources. With colleagues she developed an architectural level power simulator, SimplePower. Irwin's recent work is in mixed technology circuits. On October 1, 2019 the IEEE CEDA and ESD Alliance announced that Mary Jane Irwin will receive the 2019 Phil Kaufman Award, the EDA Industry's highest honor. She will be the first woman to receive the award.
Service to the Computing Community
Irwin has extensive service to the Computer Science research community. She is a member of the Board on Army Science and Technology, of ACM's Fellows Selection Committee, of Microsoft Research's External Research Advisory Board, and of NAE's Committee on Membership. Previously she served as a founding co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM's Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems and as Editor-in-Chief of ACM's Transactions on the Design Automation of Electronic Systems, as an elected member of the CRA's Board of Directors, of the IEEE Computer Society's Board of Governors, of ACM's Council, and as Vice President of ACM. She was also a long-time board member of CRA-W, the CRA's Committee on the Status of Women, where she is now a member emerita.
Personal life
Mary Jane Irwin was married in July 1966 has one son, John, who is also a computer scientist, and daughter-in-law, Alla, and have two grandchildren, Kai and Milo.
Honors and awards
Irwin was inducted into the AAAS in 2009. In 2010, she received the ACM Athena Lecturer Award, having been separately nominated by both the Computer Architecture and the Design Automation research communities. Irwin received an Honorary Doctorate from Chalmers University, Sweden. A list of all her awards follows.
2012 ASP-DAC Ten-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award
