Deborah Estrin

Deborah Estrin is a professor of computer science at Cornell Tech, a Cornell University campus in New York City. She holds the Robert V. Tishman Founder’s Chair, serves as the associate dean for Impact and is an affiliate faculty member at Weill Cornell Medicine. Estrin’s research activities include technologies for caregiving, immersive health, small data, participatory sensing and public interest technology.

Before joining Cornell, Estrin was founding director of the NSF Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she pioneered mobile and wireless systems to collect and analyze real-time data about the physical world. She co-founded the non-profit startup Open mHealth and has served as an Amazon Scholar and on several scientific advisory boards for early-stage mobile health startups.

Estrin earned her PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985.

Her many honours include delivering the ACM Athena Lecture in 2006 and earning the Anita Borg Institute’s Women of Vision Award for Innovation in 2007, the IEEE Internet Award in 2017, a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018 and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2022. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine. Estrin was awarded honorary doctorates from EPFL in Switzerland in 2008 and Uppsala University in Sweden in 2011.