Mary Ann Horton earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Berkeley in 1981.  She is one of the developers of Berkeley UNIX, contributing to tools such as termcap, terminfo, curses, and the vi text editor.  In the 1980s, she was an Internet Pioneer, leading the growth of Usenet Newsgroups and bringing .com e-mail to smaller organizations that couldn't get directly on the ARPANET.

While at Lucent Technologies, she championed for the first EO policy protecting Gender Identity or Expression in 1997, and the adoption of full Transgender Health Benefits in 2000.  She is the chair of Transgender at Work, and the 2001 winner of the Out & Equal Trailblazer award.

Mary Ann is currently a Vice President and Sr. Distributed Computing Engineer for JPMorgan Chase, Central Transaction Operations, where she architects, engineers, and builds UNIX servers for Statement and Check Archives.