she is a prominent computer scientist often credited as the first woman in the united states to be awarded a phd in computer science. she has led many significant projects, including the design and implementation of clu, the first programming language to support data abstraction, argus, the first high-level language to support implementation of distributed programs, and thor, an object-oriented database system. she received the 2008 turing award from the acm for her work in the design of programming languages and software methodology that led to the development of object-oriented programming.