Deborah Estrin

Deborah Estrin is a computer scientist creating open-source applications and platforms that leverage mobile computing devices and network services to address socio-technological challenges. Throughout her career, Estrin has demonstrated a remarkable ability to anticipate the applicability of technological advances to a variety of fields. She made fundamental contributions to improving the scalability and broader utility of the emerging internet through her work on network routing (the process that determines how data are forwarded from source to destination). She then went on to build the foundational protocols for wireless sensor networks—that is, connectivity among distributed autonomous sensors that record conditions in a specific environment. This effort brought together researchers from ecology, environmental science, agriculture, statistics, and computer, electrical, and civil engineering to design and implement networked sensing as an infrastructure resource for such needs as climate and ecosystem modeling, wildlife habitat monitoring, and resource management. Deborah Estrin received a B.S. (1980) from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.S. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was affiliated with the University of Southern California (1986–2000) and the University of California at Los Angeles (2000–2012), prior to joining the faculty of Cornell Tech, where she is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and associate dean. Her additional affiliations include professor in the Department of Healthcare Policy and Research at the Weill Cornell Medical College, founder of the Health Tech Hub at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, and co-founder of the nonprofit startup Open mHealth.