Ruby Bei-Loh Lee is an American electrical engineer who is currently the Forrest G. Hamrick Professor in Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University.[1] Her contributions to computer architecture include work in reduced instruction set computing, embedded systems, and hardware support for computer security and digital media.[2] At Princeton, she is the director of the Princeton Architecture Laboratory for Multimedia and Security.[3] Tech executive Joel S. Birnbaum has called her "one of the top instruction-set architects in the world".[2]
Lee graduated from Cornell University's College Scholar Program in 1973. She went to Stanford University for her graduate studies, earning a master's degree in computer science and computer engineering in 1975, and a doctorate in electrical engineering in 1980. After briefly teaching at Stanford, she joined Hewlett-Packard in 1981, eventually becoming a chief architect there in 1992, and holding a consulting faculty position at Stanford from 1989 until 1998. She moved to Princeton as the Hamrick Professor in 1998,[4] becoming at that time one of only three female full professors in engineering at Princeton, and the only one to hold an endowed chair.
At Hewlett-Packard, Lee designed the PA-RISC architecture and microprocessors based on it, and the multimedia components of the IA-64 (Itanium) architecture.[1] Much of her work since moving to Princeton has concerned both the integration of pervasive security mechanisms into computer architecture, and the hardware support for bit manipulation based cryptographic primitives.[5]
In 2001 Lee was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for pioneering multimedia instructions in general-purpose processor architecture and innovations in the design and implementation of the instruction set architecture of RISC processors."[6] She also became a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2002.[4] She was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.[7]