Pendred Noyce

Pendred (Penny) Noyce is a physician, educator, and writer. She grew up in Silicon Valley,
California, surrounded by apricot orchards and fields of mustard. Along with her brother and sisters
she rode ponies, played Indians, put on plays, and explored the countryside. The landscape was
rapidly changing, in part as a result of the work of her father, Robert Noyce, co-inventor of the
integrated circuit (computer chip) and one of the founders of Intel.

Penny attended Harvard University, then Stanford University School of Medicine. She did her
residency in internal medicine at the University of Minnesota, then moved to the Boston area to marry
her medical school classmate, Leo Liu. She worked in a community health center, but after 1990 she
began splitting her time between medical practice and the Noyce Foundation, an educational
foundation established in her father’s honor. Penny became a leader in mathematics and science
education reform in Massachusetts. She helped lead several National Science Foundation projects,
helped establish the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy, and continues to serve on the
boards of multiple educational non-profits, the Libra Foundation of Maine, and of course the Noyce
Foundation.

Penny has five children. After the youngest was born, she stepped away from the daily practice of
medicine. As the first of her children left for college, she returned to an old love, writing. Lost in
Lexicon, her first book for children, was written for her son Damian’s ninth birthday. Penny lives with
her husband and children (the children come and go) in the western suburbs of Boston.