Lynn Conway, professor emerita of electrical engineering and computer science, who quietly revolutionized microchip design and boldly blazed a trail for transgender individuals, died June 9. She was 86.
Conway has been called the hidden hand in the 1970s chip design movement that made today’s consumer electronics and personal computing devices possible.
She joined the College of Engineering in 1985 as associate dean for instruction and instructional technology. While she retired in 1998, Conway remained an influential part of the community.
As a young adult, she was one of the first Americans to undergo a modern gender transition, and became an outspoken advocate for transgender rights and women in STEM fields in her retirement.
“Lynn Conway’s example of engineering impact and personal courage has been a great source of inspiration for me and countless others,” said Michael Wellman, the Lynn A. Conway Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and professor of electrical engineering and computer science.
Faculty members remember her “friendly, sage advice in difficult times,” her positive outlook, warm encouragement, creativity and singular vision. Conway described herself in 2014 as a perennial beginner, never afraid to take on learning how to do new things.
She had no experience with microchips before she developed a simpler, scalable method for designing them with CalTech professor Carver Mead at the renowned Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the mid-’70s. Their textbook and the courses it spawned standardized and democratized a process that was once the sole purview of specialists at large, private semiconductor firms.
Thousands of students were soon trained during what came to be known as the Mead-Conway revolution in Very Large Scale Integration, which refers to the process of arranging increasingly smaller and more plentiful transistors on an integrated circuit.
“My field would not exist without Lynn Conway,” said Valeria Bertacco, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, the Mary Lou Dorf Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at CoE, and vice provost for engaged learning. “Chips used to be designed by drawing them with paper and pencil like an architect’s blueprints in the pre-digital era. Conway’s work developed algorithms that enabled our field to use software to arrange millions, and later billions, of transistors on a chip.”
During most of her career, Conway kept a low profile for her safety and job security. IBM had fired her in 1968 when she told them of her transition plans. (IBM apologized in 2020.) As a result, many of her contributions were overlooked for a long time. In 2000, she noticed others being credited and began telling her story online. Along the way she developed a catalog of resources and advice about gender identity and transitioning.
Conway was born in Mount Vernon, New York. She studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 1962 and ’63. She was a visiting professor at MIT, chief scientist at the National Science Foundation and assistant director for strategic computing at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. She held five U.S. patents and was a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
She is survived by her husband, Charles “Charlie” Rogers. They shared a passion for adventure sports, including whitewater canoeing and motocross racing.
In lieu of flowers, expressions of sympathy may be made in memory of Lynn Conway to Transgender Studies at the University of Victoria, extrweb.uvic.ca/donate-online/transchair, or the Women in Engineering Fund at U-M, giving.umich.edu/basket/fund/361348.
— Submitted by Nicole Casal Moore, College of Engineering
