College President Joins Board

Maria Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College, joined Microsoft’s board of directors in Mar. 2009. Klawe’s appointment brings the board back to 10 members after former Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Jon Shirley declined to seek reelection in Nov. 2008.

Harvey Mudd, a highly selective mathematics and science-oriented college in southern California, has been a frequent target of Microsoft recruiters. Before becoming Harvey Mudd’s president in 2006, Klawe was a dean of engineering and professor of computer science at Princeton University and head of the computer science department at the University of British Columbia. She also worked at IBM Research for eight years. She was the first woman to serve on the board of the Computing Research Association, where she cofounded the Committee on the Status of Women in Computing research (CRA-W). Klawe will be the fourth board member with significant technical expertise, joining Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and former Harvard Business School professor James Cash, Jr., both of whom have advanced degrees in computer science, as well as Chairman and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. (For a complete list of board members, see the chart “Microsoft’s Board of Directors, Mar. 2009“.)