Faith Ellen (Photo: Matt Hintsa)
Professor Faith Ellen has spent over four decades breaking barriers and pushing the boundaries of theoretical computer science. When she joined the University of Toronto in 1986, she was the only female faculty member in the Department of Computer Science. Since then, she's helped shape the field of parallel and distributed computing while mentoring a generation of future scholars.
Her pioneering work has earned her a 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from CS-Can | Info-Can, Canada’s national academic organization for computer science.
The award recognizes current or former faculty members in Canadian computer science departments, schools and faculties who have made “outstanding and sustained contributions” to the field over the course of their careers. The awards can be for achievements in research, teaching or service.
Ellen is internationally known for proving that some computational problems are either impossible to solve or require significant amounts of resources, such as time or space. This understanding helps researchers focus on simpler versions of these problems or different settings where they can be solved. She co-authored the book, Impossibility Results for Distributed Computing, which is a key resource for researchers and students.
Ellen and her students have obtained fundamental results about achieving consensus — a crucial part of many distributed systems like blockchains — and weaker versions of consensus that can be solved more easily. She developed a method to efficiently store numbers in a way that makes it quick to find the closest value, and proved no algorithm can solve this problem asymptotically faster.
Another of her innovations is a non-zero indicator, which helps processors efficiently check if a resource is being used by other processors. This algorithm is used in some computer systems to manage their memory. Her work has earned her and her students numerous best paper awards.
University Professor Allan Borodin can’t imagine a stronger candidate for this award.
“She is an exceptional scientist, a pioneer in a very important area of research, and an extremely effective mentor who has directly impacted Canadian theoretical computer science,” he said.
Ellen has been a leader in her research community, serving on committees for over 50 conferences, and holding key positions such as program committee chair for top conferences and vice president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory. She also directed the CRA-W Canadian Distributed Mentorship Project for undergraduate women in computer science for ten years.
Beyond her research, Ellen is a dedicated mentor and educator, influencing a generation of researchers. Six of her former PhD students are now faculty members at Canadian universities, and one received the CS-Can | Info-Can Canadian Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award. She currently serves as Associate Chair, Graduate Students in the Department of Computer Science.
In 1992, to build community and support the retention of women researchers in the department, she founded DCSWomen, which provides a supportive environment for female graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty members.
She holds the Bell Canada University Labs Chair in Information Systems and became a Fellow of the ACM in 2014.
Ellen joins 12 other faculty members from the Department of Computer Science who have received this award since its inception in 2014.
Eyal de Lara, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science, praised Ellen for her achievements as a trailblazing researcher and mentor.
"This award is a well-deserved testament to Faith’s outstanding contributions to theoretical computer science and her passion and dedication to mentoring female students and researchers in our department,” he said.
Read the full CS-Can | Info-Can announcement→