Pioneering Professor Shares Her Journey in Book on Women in Computer Science

06.24.2024

Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham, Founders Chair in Engineering and Computer Science.

A new book about trailblazing women in computer science highlights Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham’s journey, from growing up in Sri Lanka to becoming a respected academic at The University of Texas at Dallas and a renowned cybersecurity expert.

Rendering History: The Women of ACM-W, published in April by the Association for Computing Machinery, celebrates the 30-year history of the association’s Committee on Women in Computing (ACM-W). The book includes first-person stories from Thuraisingham and other women leaders in the field.

ACM-W formed in 1993 to provide community and support to women in computer science through lecture opportunities, awards and advocacy programs to encourage more young women to enter the male-dominated field. In 2020, women received 21% of computer science bachelor’s degrees, according to the National Science Foundation National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.

Rendering History features stories of 37 women who made history in computer science, including pioneering mathematician and programmer Ada Lovelace and the original programmers of the first general purpose computer, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), which was introduced in 1945.

Rendering History: The Women of ACM-W celebrates the 30-year history of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Committee on Women in Computing.

Thuraisingham’s contributions to computer science are extensive, said Dr. Gloria Childress Townsend, chair of computer science at DePauw University, who edited the book.

“Bhavani’s story fascinates me. Her captivating journey from Ceylon [now Sri Lanka] to The University of Texas at Dallas would appeal to any reader,” she said. “Whereas many computer scientists lend their expertise to one subfield alone, Bhavani extended her theoretical computing roots to cybersecurity, machine learning, database systems, cloud computing and data science.”

In the book, Thuraisingham tells about growing up in Sri Lanka’s minority Tamil community, which faced discrimination that included quotas limiting opportunities for college and jobs. She excelled in the Catholic schools she attended run by Irish nuns, even skipping grades, and in 1972 enrolled in the former University of Ceylon to study math and physics.

Courses in computer science, an emerging field at the time, were not available at Sri Lankan universities. In one of her classes, however, Thuraisingham learned Fortran, the first widely used programming language.

“That was when I was introduced to computer programming in Fortran and wrote my first program and used punched cards to submit the job to the computer center that then had just one machine,” Thuraisingham wrote. “I was thrilled to get the results of the first program.”

To study computer science in graduate school, Thuraisingham would need to leave Sri Lanka, but in her conservative community, she was expected to get married first. Her father, who typically would have arranged her marriage, died just before she started college. So, her uncle arranged her marriage to Dr. Thevendra Thuraisingham, who was finishing his PhD at the University of Cambridge and wanted to marry a woman with a degree in physical sciences. After meeting her potential husband, Thuraisingham agreed to the union. The couple married in 1975 and moved to England, where Thuraisingham entered graduate school and her husband became a postdoctoral researcher.

Thuraisingham at her 1977 commencement ceremony at the University of Bristol, where she earned a master’s degree in mathematical logic and foundations of computer science.

Thuraisingham earned a master’s degree in mathematical logic and foundations of computer science from the University of Bristol and a PhD in theory of computation and computability theory from Swansea University in Wales. In Rendering History, she wrote about the challenges of balancing her education and her personal life, including giving birth to her son while finishing her PhD.

“I was writing my thesis, nursing my son and also in the evenings tutoring high school students,” she wrote. “It was challenging, but I was 24, had all the energy, and continued to study the complexity of decision problems from unsolvable to solvable problems. I loved this line of research at the time and also would write quite a few single-author papers in top-tier journals on my research later on.”

Thuraisingham was the first person to prove that the general inference problem in secure database systems, in which it is possible to infer highly sensitive information from unclassified data, was unsolvable. As a result, she developed methods to prevent or minimize unauthorized inferences.

After Thuraisingham moved with her family to the U.S. in 1980, her career led to positions at Control Data Corp., Honeywell International Inc., The MITRE Corp. and the National Science Foundation. She joined UTD’s Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science in 2004. She holds the Founders Chair in Engineering and Computer Science, and is senior strategist of the UT Dallas Cyber Security Research and Education Institute, for which she was founding director.

Thuraisingham has won multiple national and international honors, including being named a fellow of technology organizations ACM, IEEE, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Inventors and the British Computer Society. She continues to make research breakthroughs, receive prestigious awards such as the IEEE’s 2023 Taylor L. Booth Education Award, and mentor women, all while balancing her career with being a wife, mother and grandmother.

Thuraisingham’s advice for women entering the field includes never letting anyone undermine you and remaining flexible when pursuing a career.

“Be patient and over time things will work out,” she wrote. “If you develop confidence through means such as hard work, support systems, mentors, making tradeoffs and not living in the past, it is possible to achieve happiness in whatever you try to do both at home and at work.”

–Kim Horner