Thelma Estrin

Thelma Estrin (1924 to 2014) was an American electrical engineer and one of the early figures in biomedical computing. Born in New York City, she earned her bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Wisconsin between 1948 and 1951, then began work in an electroencephalography department at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. In 1954 she and her husband Gerald Estrin spent fifteen months in Israel helping to design WEIZAC, the Weizmann Automatic Computer, the first electronic computer in the Middle East. From 1960 she worked at the Brain Research Institute of the University of California, Los Angeles, where she directed its Data Processing Laboratory and built one of the first systems for converting electrical activity of the nervous system into digital form. She later became a professor in residence in the UCLA computer science department, served as president of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, and in 1982 became the first woman to serve as an IEEE vice president. She retired in 1991 and died on 15 February 2014.