Stephanie Forrest

Biography

After her BA from St. John's College in 1977, Forrest studied Computer and Communication Sciences at the University of Michigan, where she received her MS in 1982 and in 1985 her PhD with a thesis entitled "A study of parallelism in the classifier system and its application to classification in KL-ONE semantic networks."

After graduation Forrest started worked for Teknowledge Inc. and worked at the Center for Nonlinear Studies of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 1990 she joined the University of New Mexico, where she is appointed Professor of Computer Science and directs the Computer Immune Systems Group, ad the Adaptive Computation Laboratory. From 2006 to 2011 she chaired the Computer Science Department. In the 1990s she is also affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute, where she was Interim Vice President in the year 1999 to 2000.

Forrest was awarded in 1991 the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, in 2009 the IFIP TC2 Manfred Paul Award for Excellence in Software, and in 2011 the ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award.

Work

Forrest's research interests are in the field of "adaptive systems, including genetic algorithms, computational immunology, biological modeling, automated software repair, and computer security."

According to the National Academies her research since the 1990s has included "developing the first practical anomaly intrusion-detection system; designing automated responses to cyberattacks; writing an early influential paper proposing automatic diversity and introducing instruction-set randomization as a particular implementation; developing noncryptographic privacy-enhancing data representations; agent-based modeling of large-scale computational networks; and recently, work on automated repair of security vulnerabilities. She has conducted many computational modeling projects in biology, where her specialties are immunology and evolutionary diseases, such as Influenza and cancer."