Mary Katherine Wootters is an American coding theorist,

information theorist Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, in the 1920s, and Claude Shannon in the 1940s. ...

, and

theoretical computer scientist computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, lambda calculus, and type theory. It is difficult to circumscribe the th ...

. She is an assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering and a member of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

Education and career

Wootters majored in mathematics and computer science at

Swarthmore College Swarthmore College ( , ) is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1864, with its first classes held in 1869, Swarthmore is one of the earliest coeduca ...

, graduating in 2008. She completed her Ph.D. at the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

in 2014; her dissertation, ''Any errors in this dissertation are probably fixable: topics in probability and error correcting codes'', was supervised by Martin Strauss. She joined the Stanford faculty after postdoctoral research at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

. In 2021, Wotters became apart of a team of engineers and computer scientists at Stanford with the aim of increasing processing power and memory capacity for battery powered smart devices. The Team combined several-energy efficient hybrid chips to create the illusion of one larger chip, This allows for devices to run AI tasks much faster.

Recognition

As a student at Swarthmore, Wootters won an honorable mention for the 2008

Alice T. Schafer Prize The Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize is given annually to an undergraduate woman for excellence in mathematics by the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). The prize, which carries a monetary award, is named for former AWM president and fou ...

of the

Association for Women in Mathematics The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment o ...

, for undergraduate research on configuration spaces of linkages and stick numbers of

knots A knot is a fastening in rope or interwoven lines. Knot may also refer to: Places * Knot, Nancowry, a village in India Archaeology * Knot of Isis (tyet), symbol of welfare/life. * Minoan snake goddess figurines#Sacral knot Arts, entertainme ...

. She was awarded the Sumner Byron Myers Prize for her PhD thesis. Wootters was one of the inaugural winners of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award, in 2015. In 2019, she was the recipient of a

National Science Foundation CAREER Award The National Science Foundation CAREER awards, presented by the National Science Foundation (NSF), are in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through research and education, and the integration of these endeavors i ...

and a

Sloan Research Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

. In 2022, Wootters won the James L. Massey Research & Teaching Award for Young Scholars of the

IEEE Information Theory Society The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

References

External links

Home page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Wootters, Mary Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer scientists American information theorists Coding theorists American women computer scientists Theoretical computer scientists Swarthmore College alumni University of Michigan alumni Stanford University faculty