Jean Bacon facts for kids

Jean Bacon was born in 1942 and is a British professor who studies distributed systems. She is an emeritus professor at the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. This means she has retired from her main teaching role but still works with the university.

At Cambridge, she helped lead the Opera Research Group, which started in the 1990s. Before that, in the 1970s, she taught at Hatfield Technical College. There, she helped create one of the first university courses in computer science in the United Kingdom. Even after retiring from Cambridge in 2010, Professor Bacon has kept working on projects. These projects involve distributed systems and keeping things safe in cloud computing.

Early Life and Education

Jean Bacon was born in Sheffield, England, in 1942. She grew up in a family where people worked hard for a living. She went to Penistone Grammar School. Later, she earned her first university degree, a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in mathematics, from the University of London.

Her first experience with computers was during a summer job in the early 1960s. After that, she worked in computer-related jobs at places like the National Physical Laboratory. In 1968, she started teaching. At the same time, she worked part-time to earn her Master of Science (M.Sc.) degree.

In 1973, she moved to Hatfield, which is now the University of Hertfordshire. Here, she helped design one of the first university courses focused on computer science. After her son was born in 1976, Jean Bacon continued to teach. She also worked part-time on her Ph.D. degree at Hatfield. For her Ph.D., she studied how computer kernels work and how to build distributed systems.

Research and Contributions

In 1985, Jean Bacon joined the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Her work there focused on designing distributed systems and middleware. A distributed system is like a big computer program that runs on many different computers at once. Middleware is software that helps different computer programs talk to each other.

She was the first woman to join the Computer Laboratory. At Cambridge, she was a co-leader of the Opera Research Group. This group has been working on important computer research since the 1990s. She has also written several textbooks about how computer systems can work at the same time or across different locations.

Professor Bacon is a Fellow of the IEEE and the British Computer Society. Being a Fellow means she is recognized as a very important expert in her field. She was also the first editor in chief for an IEEE magazine called IEEE Distributed Systems Online. She served on the IEEE Board of Governors for two terms, from 2002 to 2004 and again from 2005 to 2007. In 2013, she received an honorary degree, a Doctor of the University, from the Open University.

Personal Life

Jean Bacon has one son, who was born in 1976. Besides her work in computer science, she is also an artist. She has shown her paintings in art exhibitions.