Lynn Conway

Lynn Ann Conway (1938–2024) was an American computer scientist and electrical engineer whose work helped transform modern chip design. After early research at IBM, she joined Xerox PARC, where she collaborated with Carver Mead on new approaches to very-large-scale integration (VLSI). Their ideas, widely taught through the textbook *Introduction to VLSI Systems* (1980), helped launch the “Mead–Conway” revolution in design methodology and education. Conway later served as a professor at the University of Michigan and contributed to computer architecture and communications. In the 1990s she publicly came out as transgender and became a prominent advocate for transgender rights and visibility.