Margaret Burnett is currently a professor of computer science in the School of EECS at Oregon State University. Her research interests are where programming languages, human-computer interaction, and software engineering meet: namely, in visual programming languages and in how programming language and software engineering research can be applied to support end-user programming. She has a long history of research in these issues and others relating to human issues of programming. She is also the principal architect of the Forms/3 and the FAR visual programming languages and, together with Gregg Rothermel, of the WYSIWYT testing methodology for end-user programmers. She was the founding project director of the EUSES Consortium, a multi-institution collaboration among Oregon State University and Carnegie Mellon, City University London, Drexel University, Pennsylvania State, Saturday Academy, University of Nebraska, University of Washington, University of Cambridge (U.K.), and IBM to help End Users Shape Effective Software.

Burnett was a recipient of IBM's International Faculty Award (2007, 2008). She was also recently honored with Oregon State University's Excellence in Graduate Mentoring Award (2010), OSU College of Engineering’s Research Award (2009), OSU College of Engineering’s Research Collaboration Award (2005), and with OSU’s Elizabeth P. Ritchie Distinguished Professor Award (2000). She is a past recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Young Investigator Award (1994). She has served on program committees for numerous ACM and IEEE conferences, including the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, and Human-Centric Computing, the ACM Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, the ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, the ACM Conference on Functional Programming Languages; on the steering committee for the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing and the ACM Conference on Software Visualization. She is a senior member of IEEE and a fellow of ACM.