As special advisor to the Associate Provost, Susan Graham contributes her expertise to CDSS research and policy initiatives, particularly in the areas of artificial intelligence and public interest technology. Graham is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor Emerita of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Emerita at UC Berkeley. She received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Harvard University and master's and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Stanford University. Her research spans many aspects of programming language implementation, software tools, software development, environments, and high-performance computing. 

She has served on numerous advisory committees, including the U.S. President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, the Harvard Board of Overseers, the Curtis Institute of Music Board of Overseers, the Harvard Corporation, and the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). She served as chief computer scientist for the NSF-sponsored National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, and as vice-chair and then chair of the NSF-sponsored Computing Community Consortium. 

She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and an Eminent Member of Eta Kappa Nu. She was the founding editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. Her honors include the ACM SIGPLAN Career Programming Language Achievement Award, the ACM Distinguished Service Award, the Harvard Medal, the IEEE von Neumann Medal , the Berkeley Citation, the ACM/IEEE Ken Kennedy Award, and the Computing Research Association Distinguished Service Award. She was named a Berkeley Fellow in 2011.