Ruby B. Lee

Ruby Bei-Loh Lee is an American electrical engineer who is currently the Forrest G. Hamrick Professor in Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University.[https://www.princeton.edu/~rblee/ Faculty profile], Princeton University, retrieved 2015-06-13. Her contributions to computer architecture include work in reduced instruction set computing, embedded systems, and hardware support for computer security and digital media.{{citation|url=https://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/02/0401/1a.shtml|journal=Princeton Weekly Bulletin|date=April 1, 2002|volume=91|issue=21|title=Starting from scratch: Ruby Lee draws on experience in industry and academia to rethink computer design|first=Steven|last=Schultz}}. At Princeton, she is the director of the Princeton Architecture Laboratory for Multimedia and Security.[http://palms.ee.princeton.edu/node/2 PALMS People], retrieved 2015-06-13. Tech executive Joel S. Birnbaum has called her "one of the top instruction-set architects in the world".

Education and career

Lee graduated from Cornell University's College Scholar Program in 1973. She went to Stanford University for her graduate studies, earning a master's degree in computer science and computer engineering in 1975, and a doctorate in electrical engineering in 1980. After briefly teaching at Stanford, she joined Hewlett-Packard in 1981, eventually becoming a chief architect there in 1992, and holding a consulting faculty position at Stanford from 1989 until 1998. She moved to Princeton as the Hamrick Professor in 1998,[https://www.princeton.edu/~rblee/Lee%20NSF%20Bio%20Cybertrust.pdf Two-page NSF biosketch], retrieved 2015-06-13. becoming at that time one of only three female full professors in engineering at Princeton, and the only one to hold an endowed chair.

Contributions

At Hewlett-Packard, Lee designed the PA-RISC architecture and microprocessors based on it, and the multimedia components of the IA-64 (Itanium) architecture. Much of her work since moving to Princeton has concerned both the integration of pervasive security mechanisms into computer architecture, and the hardware support for bit manipulation based cryptographic primitives.{{citation|url=http://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=763916|title=A conversation with Ruby Lee|journal=Ubiquity|date=March 2002}}.

Awards and honors

In 2001 Lee was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for pioneering multimedia instructions in general-purpose processor architecture and innovations in the design and implementation of the instruction set architecture of RISC processors."ACM Fellow [http://awards.acm.org/award_winners/lee_3798436.cfm award citation], retrieved 2015-06-13. She also became a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2002. She was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.[https://www.amacad.org/new-members-2020 American Academy of Arts and Sciences Class of 2020]