Liskov was born in 1939 California, the eldest of Jane (née Dickhoff) and Moses Huberman's four children.[4] She earned her BA in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. In 1968 she became one of the first women in the United States to be awarded a Ph.D. from a computer science department when she was awarded her degree from Stanford University.[5][6] The topic of her Ph.D. thesis was a computer program to play chess endgames.[7] In 1970, she married Nathan Liskov, and their son, Moses Liskov, was born in 1975.
Liskov has led many significant projects, including the Venus operating system, a small, low-cost and interactive timesharing system; the design and implementation of CLU; Argus, the first high-level language to support implementation of distributed programs and to demonstrate the technique of promise pipelining; and Thor, an object-oriented database system. With Jeannette Wing, she developed a particular definition of subtyping, commonly known as the Liskov substitution principle. She leads the Programming Methodology Group at MIT, with a current research focus in Byzantine fault tolerance and distributed computing.