Her 1985 work with Michael J. Fischer and Mike Paterson[4] on consensus problems received the PODC Influential-Paper Award in 2001.[5] Their work showed that in an asynchronous distributed system, consensus is impossible if there is one processor that crashes. On their contribution, Jennifer Welch wrote that "this result has had a monumental impact in distributed computing, both theory and practice. Systems designers were motivated to clarify their claims concerning under what circumstances the systems work."[5]
She is the author of numerous research articles about distributed algorithms and impossibility results, and about formal modeling and validation of distributed systems (see, e.g., input/output automaton). She is the author of the graduate textbook "Distributed Algorithms".[6] She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and an ACM Fellow.[7]
Lynch, Nancy; Merritt, Michael; Weihl, William; Fekete, Alan (1994). Atomic Transactions. San Mateo, California: Morgan Kaufmann. pp. 476. ISBN9781558601048.
Kaynar, Dilsun; Lynch, Nancy; Segala, Roberto; Vaandrager, Frits (2011). The Theory of Timed I/O Automata (2nd ed.). San Rafael, California: Morgan & Claypool. p. 137. ISBN9781608450039.