This is a bit late, but I've been inspired to post after reading about the women other people admire. Here are a few of mine.
- Margo Seltzer: developer of the BSD log-structured filesystem and Berkeley DB. An open source entrepreneur - founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software - who also has a successful academic career.
- Dina Katabi invented XCP, the eXplicit Congestion control Protocol, which is a brilliant way for routers to make each individual flow adjust to the level of congestion without the need for any per-flow state. I think it was one of the first papers I read about advanced transport protocol research, and I have continued to follow the subject since then.
- Lisa Dusseault is a WebDAV expert and IETFer, currently one of the Applications Area Directors and therefore a member of the IESG. She was one of the funner people I met at the Paris IETF meeting a few years ago. I like the new ideas she's brought to the IESG, such as monthly updates on her work as Apps AD.
- And of course 👤rmc28, who got the University Card working properly and now slaves away on the student information system.