Ver¿nica Lagrange Moutinho dos Reis is a computer scientist at Hewlett-Packard Company. She works on measuring and evaluating overall system performance, as well as specific hardware and software components of HP Neoview systems and, until 2006, various generations of NonStop systems. She has also contributed to the design of in-house business intelligence (BI) benchmarks. Lagrange’s previous assignments at Compaq/HP included modeling and simulation of NonStop system components, and maintaining and updating measurement tools based on MIPS processor performance counters. Prior to HP, Lagrange worked for many years at the Computer Laboratory (NCE) of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (UFRJ). She started as a trainee, then programmer, systems analyst, VAX/VMS system manager, and--after earning her PhD in 1996--a principal investigator with the high-performance group. The group studied the feasibility of parallelizing and porting applications and tools to the IBM SP-2, and evaluated their performance. The group was also responsible for SP-2 technical support. From 1997 to 1999, she held a joint appointment with the UFRJ’s Mathematics Department, teaching undergraduate and graduate classes in operating systems. She also taught parallel programming classes at the undergraduate level.

Ver¿nica earned her PhD from the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and her BS from the Mathematics Department at UFRJ. Ver¿nica earned one MS from COPPE (Graduate School of Engineering) at UFRJ and another from UCI. Her professional interests include computer architecture and operating systems for parallel and distributed environments; performance analysis, evaluation, modeling, and simulation; parallel and distributed programming languages and tools; and fault-tolerant computing.

Throughout her career, Ver¿nica has had the opportunity to work with many programming languages, manufacturers, and tools. The programming languages she has used range from FORTRAN and Assemblers (8080, Z80, MIPS) all the way to SQL/MX. The tools and platforms she has experience with include Unisys’ Cande and WFL; Digital’s VMS and DCL; DOS; CP/M; IBM’s AIX; Sun’s Solaris; HP’s NSK; and OSS.

Ver¿nica is from a time and place where computer science was mostly a girl thing. Her graduating class in 1983 was 65% female. Just one year earlier, the computer science class was 90% female. However, two years later, the graduating class of 1985 was only about 15% female. Ver¿nica thinks this would be a good research topic for sociology students: What happened? Did girls lose interest or did boys (and their parents) suddenly discover this fascinating field?

Ver¿nica Lagrange is a member of the ACM and has been a reviewer with Computing Reviews since 2000, with over 20 reviews published.

Read our Q&A with Veronica Lagrange here.