Stella Atkins facts for kids

Stella Atkins is a very important person in the world of computer science. She is a Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University in Canada. This means she is a retired professor who still keeps her special title.

Stella Atkins also helped start a group called Systers. This group is for women who work in technology and computing. Her main work involves using computers in medicine. This includes things like computer-assisted surgery and studying sleep patterns. She also works on how to show and understand medical images.

Stella Atkins's Journey in Science

Stella Atkins grew up in England. She loved math from a young age. Her father was an engineer, and her mother was a statistician. This means her parents also worked with numbers and science.

She enjoyed reading math books just for fun! But her sister was already studying math in college. So, Stella decided to try something different. She chose to study chemistry instead.

University Life

When it was time to pick a university, Stella chose the University of Nottingham in England. She was inspired because a famous chemist, Dorothy Hodgkin, taught there. Dorothy Hodgkin had just won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Stella earned her first degree, a B.Sc. in chemistry, from Nottingham University in 1966. After that, she started working at the Shell Refining Company. She worked as a chemical engineer.

From Chemistry to Computers

At the Shell company, Stella used computers to simulate oil refineries. She also simulated how oil flows. This work made her very interested in computers and how they could be used.

Later, Stella became a computer programmer advisor. She worked at the University of Warwick in England. While there, she earned another degree. She received her M.Phil. in computer science in 1976.

Stella continued her studies even further. In 1985, she earned her Ph.D. in computer science. She received this advanced degree from the University of British Columbia in Canada.