Stella Atkins

Stella Atkins is a Professor Emeritus in computing science at Simon Fraser University in Canada and one of the founding members of the Systers community for technical women in computing. Her primary research interests are in medical computing, including laparoscopic surgery, sleep studies and telehealth, and medical image display and analysis. She grew up in England with an intense interest in math, and chose the University of Nottingham because the chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, who had just received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was there. After her BSc in chemistry from Nottingham University in 1966 she worked at the Shell Refining Company as a chemical engineer, performing simulations of oil refineries and oil flow, where she developed her interest in computing. She later became a scientific computer programmer advisor at the University of Warwick, received her MPhil in computer science there in 1976, and received her PhD in computer science from the University of British Columbia in 1985.