2020 Ada Lovelace Honoree Anne Lee “Pioneering Software Engineer” in telecommunications technology

Bell Labs Chief Technology Office Partner Anne Lee’s first experiences in the United States came soon after the age of three, when her family moved from Canada – where her paternal great great grandfather had immigrated to in the 1800s - into the middle of civil unrest unfolding on the streets of her new Chicago West Garfield Park neighborhood. In 1968, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. set off race riots across the country including where Anne and her family lived; sadly, this area of Chicago has not recovered to this day. 

Several years later, the family would move to the Argyle neighborhood which was growing into an Asian-American community. “The area was originally planned to become a new Chicago Chinatown, but the end of the Vietnam War brought refugees to Argyle transforming it instead into a vibrant Chinese and Southeast Asian American enclave.” shares Anne.

As the daughter and eldest of two children to an older father who had run various storefronts (flower shop, café, restaurants) and a mother who worked as a seamstress in local garment factories, Anne had always dreamed about the prospect of becoming a scientist. This would eventually push her to become the first generation in her family to go onto study in college and make her way into the field of technology. 

But first, Anne would take four busses – two each way - every day to attend a magnet high school in Chicago; one with a large campus and thousands of students requiring two years of shop classes as part of their curriculum. The once all-boys school would decide in 1971 to admit girls amidst protests by students who held a walkout chanting “We don’t want no broads.” Spurred on by the space race, it had evolved in the 1950’s to become a top, selective admissions science and engineering college prep school. The argument against allowing girls in was that girls would lower the prestige and quality of the school and would lower the school’s standards. This didn’t happen and instead, the school has maintained its top ranking with a 50/50 gender balanced student population. 

“My father had a heart attack when I was 7 years old and his health declined over the next years, eventually passing away when I was 14,” says Anne. “After he passed, I needed to help my non-English speaking mother. That included stepping up to often diagnose and repair issues that arose in the aging 2-flat that my family owned. For instance, a couple of times, a window was struck by someone shooting a BB gun in our neighborhood. To repair the window, I would go to the hardware store, buy a pane of glass and use my shop skills from school to fix it. I wasn’t afraid to pick up a tool to help save my family money.”

Anne would later graduate near the top of her class and go on to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. “As I was making my way through college and working in various programming internships at tech companies, one of my mentors agreed with the observation that ‘The World is Moving to Software’”. This led me to follow up my engineering degree with a Master’s in Computer Science.”