Maria (Lolo) Penedo

Dr. Penedo is a Distinguished Technical Fellow in Northrop Grumman and the chair of the corporate University Relations Advisory Board. Among her many activities, she chairs a division Technology Steering Group, leads a technology online network, a local technology council, and is the editor in chief of the Division Technical Newsletter. Most of those activities foster technology acquisition/transfer and help NG in the identification of promising technologies and engineering techniques that may be applied to its current and future business. In the past, she was instrumental in the establishment and institutionalization of collaboration technology and NG’s internal Wikipedia denoted “ourwiki”.

Penedo is a recognized leading expert in the design, insertion and use of software engineering and information technology. During her career, she has published internationally and coordinated national and international conferences, represented Northrop Grumman in DARPA-funded industry/university consortia, and has been the company’s representative in multiple university relations. She was an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) and Wiley’s Software Process: Improvement and Practice Journals, and a Distinguished Visitor of the IEEE Computer Society.

She has a B.S. in Math and a M.S. in Computer Science from Brazil, and a PhD in Computer Science from UCLA.

Dr. Penedo is married to John Silvester, British, a USC Professor; they met in grad school at UCLA. She has 2 children, a boy who recently returned from Africa where he served in the Peace Corps, and a daughter who is doing a masters in architecture.