We are delighted to award the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award to Martha Evens, Professor Emeritus at Illinois Institute of Technology in Computer Science and a long-time member of ACL, for being a path blazer in a multitude of ways. First as an outstanding professor and mentor in Computer Science, with over 300 publications and over 100 PhD students, and for her pioneering research contributions in lexical databases and intelligent tutoring systems for medical students. Professor Evens received a BS in Mathematics from Bryn Mawr, summa cum laude, in 1955, an MS in Mathematics from Radcliffe in 1957, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northwestern in 1975.
While publishing books on lexical databases and developing CIRCSIM, a successful, fielded medical informatics tutoring system, Professor Evens also taught almost every CS course in the curriculum and performed extraordinary service to her students, her institution and her community. She served as an Associate Editor for Computational Linguistics (then the American Journal of Computational Linguistics) from 1981-1984, was the President of ACL in 1984, was on the editorial board of the Cambridge University Press series, Studies in Natural Language Processing, 1982-1990, was on the Planning Committee and later the Board of Directors for the American Federation of Information Processing from 1983-1990, and on the Organizing Committee and then a Board Member for SIGLEX from 1992-2004. Everything she did, she did with intelligence, grace, humility and for the greater good, truly an example to us all.