It’s a bit troublesome to describe the work Stephanie Forrest does as director of Arizona State University’s Biodesign Center for Biocomputation, Security and Society.
Her ASU biography lays it out this fashion: “She is a computer scientist who studies the biology of computation and computation in biology, including biological modeling of immunological processes and evolutionary diseases, cybersecurity, software engineering and evolutionary computation.”
Got it?
What is obvious, in accordance to Ross Maciejewski, director and professor on the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, is that Forrest has been a pioneer in her subject and is nicely deserving of being named one in every of four 2026 Regents Professors.
ASU’s highest college honor acknowledges sustained scholarship, nationwide and worldwide distinction, and contributions which have considerably superior their fields and the college’s mission.
“Stephanie is well known across the country,” mentioned Maciejewski, who wrote a letter of assist for Forrest. “She’s been heavily involved in computing leadership for the majority of her career.
“I was an associate professor when she moved here, and I remember a colleague came up to me, one that I didn’t think had any connection to Stephanie, and he said, ‘Wow, you guys hired such a great person.’ It’s because she’s so connected in the computing community over decades of work.”
The Regents designation, which Forrest referred to as “totally surprising and wonderful,” honors a profession that Forrest by no means anticipated. She grew up on the outskirts of Bellingham, Washington, residing in a house with out a tv and spending most of her time enjoying within the woods along with her siblings.
She grew up within the public school system and rapidly fell in love with math, a lot in order that she envisioned herself turning into a high school math teacher.
“I kind of overcorrected,” Forrest mentioned with amusing.
There have been instances all through her profession, Forrest will admit, that she thought she would nonetheless love instructing math to high school college students. But when her daughter was in center school, she went to mother and father’ evening, noticed how “young and enthusiastic and funny” the academics have been and mentioned to herself, ‘Oh, man, I’m not going to be good at this.’”
So, how did a wanna-be math teacher turn into one of many nation’s main specialists in computational biology?
Hold on. Perhaps this could be a great time to describe computational biology and Forrest’s revolutionary work within the subject.
Essentially, Maciejewski mentioned, for the reason that Nineties, Forrest has taken insights from biology and utilized them to laptop ideas.
“She talks about the body’s defense mechanisms, like how the body defends itself from disease,” Maciejewski mentioned. “What could you learn about that in terms of teaching a computer system to defend itself from viruses?
“When you think about the body, it has an immune system with white blood cells and antibodies, which are looking for foreign pathogens in your body. In cybersecurity, you have software and hardware. So, you want to have some underlying computation that’s acting as white blood cells and looking for potential malicious actors. Stephanie has worked on computer programs that are looking for things that are not supposed to be in your network or system.”
In addition, Forrest has carried out a number of computational modeling tasks in biology, taking a look at immunology and evolutionary illnesses resembling influenza and most cancers.
How Forrest bought to this place is, as she admitted, a collection of random occasions.
She solely heard of St. John’s College, a personal liberal arts faculty in Annapolis, Maryland, when the older brother of a high school good friend talked about it. Forrest leafed by means of a giant e-book her high school had on completely different faculties and universities, examine St. John’s and thought, “Oh yes, this is what I’m going to do.”
It was at St. John’s that Forrest, the math devotee, fell in love with biology as nicely.
“I had a biology class that was phenomenal,” she mentioned. “We spent a semester studying embryology and development and reading the original works that led to modern biology, and then we spent an entire semester doing dissection and genetics experiments. Looking back on it, it was incredible.”
It wasn’t till Forrest’s senior 12 months, nevertheless, that she discovered how to mix her twin passions right into a profession. She wrote her senior thesis on Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, formulated by Kurt Gödel in 1931. The theorems revolutionized logic by demonstrating that any constant formal system able to expressing fundamental arithmetic will inevitably include statements which are true however unprovable inside that system.
“That was, in a way, my path into computing,” Forrest mentioned. “And in graduate school, I became interested in the deep connections between biology and computation.”
A random dialog in 2009 additionally impacted her profession. She was at a committee assembly for a big Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, when within the lunch line she met a younger professor from the University of Virginia who labored in software program engineering and programming language.
“I thought, ‘Software engineering, the world’s most boring topic,’ Forrest said. “But the (MURI) meeting was even more boring, so I said, ‘Oh, that sounds really interesting, let’s have a conversation.’”
Soon, they have been learning software program from a organic perspective.
“For example, if you make a random change to a piece of software, how likely is it to change the behavior of the program?” Forrest mentioned. “We think a computer program is this glass house of cards. If you touch it, the whole thing will fall down. Turns out that’s not true.
“It’s much more biological in that many random changes have no observable effect, similar to mutational robustness in biology. This is just one piece of evidence that has convinced me that software and computing are becoming more like biology over time.”
Forrest’s checklist of accomplishments is, as one may think, prolonged and spectacular, together with a one-year stint as senior science advisor for cyber coverage on the U.S. Department of State, a number of nationwide awards and dozens of analysis articles.
Forrest additionally continues to mentor college students throughout the nation, together with undergraduates, graduate college students and PhD college students, 26 of whom have graduated with the assistance of Forrest’s mentorship.
“She’s really working to mentor that next generation of students,” Maciejewski mentioned.
One of these college students is Sameera Shah, a senior at ASU majoring in laptop science. Shah, who’s engaged on a undertaking during which automated program restore strategies restore software program bugs by robotically suggesting small modifications, mentioned she has been motivated by Forrest’s work and encouragement.
“The project I’m working on, she was working on it I think 15 or 20 years ago,” Shah mentioned. “As a college student, sometimes you want to get through things fast or you might be discouraged when you don’t see results.
“But having someone around who’s been in this field for so long and is encouraging you, it’s really inspiring.”
Inspiring and motivating college students.
Sounds like Forrest would have made a great high school math teacher in spite of everything.