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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, 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 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. Three more novels in the Lexicon series are planned, along with other books for young people. She lives with her husband and children (the children come and go) in the western suburbs of Boston.
Penny attended Harvard University and 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. As an advocate for mathematics and science education reform in Massachusetts, Penny helped shepherd the Commonwealth to its current position as a top-performing state in the nation. 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. Currently she is co-editing a book for the Harvard Education Press on formative assessment in schools.