graduates of the highly valued doctorate of artificial intelligence when she finished in 1977.

For Dr. Dahl's PhD research, she combined her love of literature (she's won awards for her poetry and short fiction) with computer science. Having excelled in mathematics, she was attracted to logic and became one of the few researchers pioneering a new field called logic programming. She created the first program using logic programming that could decipher queries and commands in a human language.

Dr. Dahl arrived in Canada at SFU as the field of logic programming exploded and at a time when she realized Argentina was not safe for her.

Dr. Dahl and her husband, a professor from Kentucky, commuted between their respective universities, trading research semesters, and she was soon pregnant with her son Alex.(Her marriage ended while Alex was a toddler. Her daughter Maria was born later during a second long-term relationship.) Her research was thriving, and Dr. Dahl had grown used to being a rare woman in a very male-dominated field. She often received letters from colleagues addressed "Dear Sir."

Dr. Dahl was surprised when she asked the SFU faculty association how to apply for maternity leave and was told the situation had never arisen. "It was a coincidence: Babies were always born during research semesters." Yet she shrugged it all off.

But she couldn't ignore all evidence of what she interpreted as gender-based discrimination. When she applied to become a full professor, she was told she didn't have enough academic publications even though a male colleague had recently been advanced with