NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering
Software Science and Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Research Interests

• distributed computing
• real-time computing
• algorithms
• lower bounds
• formal modeling
• verification

Nancy Lynch is the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She heads the Theory of Distributed Systems research group in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She is also currently a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Lynch received her B.S. degree in mathematics from Brooklyn College in 1968, and her PhD in mathematics from MIT in 1972. She has written numerous research articles about distributed algorithms and impossibility results, and about formal modeling and verification of distributed systems. Her best-known research contribution is the \\"FLP\\" impossibility result for distributed consensus in the presence of process failures, developed with Fischer and Paterson in 1982.

Lynch's other well-known research contributions include the I/O automata mathematical system modeling frameworks, with Tuttle, Vaandrager, Segala, and Kaynar. Her recent work is focused on algorithms for mobile ad hoc networks.

Lynch has written books on \\"Atomic Transactions\\" (with Merritt, Weihl, and Fekete), on \\"Distributed Algorithms\\", and on \\"The Theory of Timed I/O Automata\\" (with Kaynar, Segala, and Vaandrager). She is an ACM Fellow, and a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was co-winner of the first (2006) van Wijngaarden prize, and was awarded the 2007 Knuth Prize, the 2010 IEEE Emanuel Piore award, and the 2012 Athena award. Lynch has supervised over 25 PhD students and over 50 Masters students, as well as numerous postdoctoral research associates.

In May 2016, Lynch was one of four MIT professors elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Bio updated: Mon May 9th, 2015