Lynn Conway in 2023. She was a former professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan. Lynn Conway, who ushered in a computer revolution by helping reimagine microchip design — and who remained on the cutting edge for decades, challenging ignorance and prejudice in science when she publicly came out as a transgender woman late in her career — died June 9 at a hospital in Jackson, Mich. She was 86.
In part, Dr. Conway acknowledged, she had avoided the spotlight intentionally, living in “stealth mode” for fear that her gender identity would wreck her career. It had already cost her her job once, when she was fired from IBM in 1968 after confiding to managers that she was planning to undergo gender-confirmation surgery, a then-novel procedure that she had to travel to Mexico to receive.
Dr. Conway also published a multipart autobiographical essay on her website, detailing her early struggles to find support from friends and family members. She showed little bitterness about those years, including when it came to her firing from IBM, an episode that forced her and her family — at the time, she was married and had two young daughters — to live on welfare for three months.
Through one of her instructors, she landed a job at IBM, where she joined a research team, code-named Project Y, working to build a new super-fast computer out of an office in Menlo Park, Calif. The supercomputer design was never completed, but the project was credited with making technological advances that were used to improve computer speed and performance.