Linda Northrop is an SEI alumni employee.

Linda Northrop has 45 years of experience in the software development field as a practitioner, researcher, manager, consultant, author, speaker, and educator. She is a Fellow at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI) where she is currently a part-time employee working for the CTO on strategic technical activities. During her tenure at the SEI, she held a number of leadership positions, collaborated with academic and industrial researchers, and worked with federal, energy, health-care, and computational science agencies as well as commercial organizations. Under her leadership, the SEI developed software architecture and product line methods that are used worldwide, a series of five highly acclaimed books, and software architecture and software product line curricula.  She led a cross-disciplinary research group on ultra-large-scale systems that resulted in the book Ultra-Large-Scale Systems: The Software Challenge of the Future, which has motivated research at the SEI and around the world. Her main professional interests are software architecture, software product lines, ultra-large-scale systems, and software innovations to aid disabled children.