Ann S. Bowers '59
Ann led human resources at Intel Corporation in the 1970s and was one of Apple’s first vice presidents in the 1980s. She spent her career developing and fostering an environment where technologists could thrive.
In addition to her professional accomplishments, Ann was an active philanthropist for many years — including chairing the board for The Noyce Foundation, which focuses on improving math and science education in public schools.
Ann served as a trustee and a member of the President’s Council of Cornell Women and numerous Cornell advisory boards. She also chaired the Cornell Silicon Valley advisors, where she passionately sought to galvanize the university’s presence in her Bay Area community.
The nine-figure transformative gift established the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science in December 2020 and cemented the college’s status as a leading academic center for tech innovation, radical collaboration, and world-class scholarship.
The gift allows Cornell to leverage pioneering work in computing, information, and statistics and data science — a legacy that was seeded in 1965 when Cornell founded one of the first computer science departments in the country, and then catapulted forward when the university undertook the bold experiment in 1999 to create a combined Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS). Cornell Bowers is the first college at Cornell named for a woman.
