Frances (Fran) Elizabeth Allen

Pioneer in optimizing compilers and the first woman to win the Turing Award, Allen was also the first female IBM Fellow.

Allen was an expert in the field of optimizing compilers. As a pioneer in compiler organization and optimization algorithms, she made seminal contributions to the science. Her work on interprocedural analysis and automatic parallelization continued to be on the leading edge of compiler research.

Allen successfully reduced this science to practice through the transfer of this technology to products such as the STRETCH HARVEST Compiler, the COBOL Compiler, and the Parallel FORTRAN Product.