Jill Loraine Zimmerman (born 23 March 1959) is an American computer scientist and the James M. Beall Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at

Goucher College Goucher College ( ') is a private liberal arts college in Towson, Maryland. It was chartered in 1885 by a conference in Baltimore led by namesake John F. Goucher and local leaders of the Methodist Episcopal Church.https://archive.org/details/ ...

. Since 2006, she has been the head of the Goucher Robotics Lab.

Early life and education

Zimmerman is from

Naperville Naperville ( ) is a city in DuPage and Will counties in the U.S. state of Illinois. It is in the Chicago metro area, west of the city. Naperville was founded in 1831 by Joseph Naper. The city was established by the banks of the DuPage river ...

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a state in the Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolitan areas include, Peoria and Roc ...

. While in high school in 1975, Zimmerman and her father built a computer with four kilobytes of memory after being inspired by the January cover story of ''

Popular Mechanics ''Popular Mechanics'' (sometimes PM or PopMech) is a magazine of popular science and technology, featuring automotive, home, outdoor, electronics, science, do-it-yourself, and technology topics. Military topics, aviation and transportation o ...

'' by Ed Roberts on building your own computers. Zimmerman later remarked that it was this same article that inspired

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...

. In 1981, Zimmerman earned a Bachelor of Science with distinction in Computer and Informational Sciences with a minor in Mathematics from

Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and ...

. At graduation, she ranked among the top ten students in the School of Science and was a member of

Phi Beta Kappa The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal a ...

and

Phi Kappa Phi The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi (or simply Phi Kappa Phi or ) is an honor society established in 1897 to recognize and encourage superior scholarship without restriction as to area of study, and to promote the "unity and democracy of education ...

. Upon enrolling in doctoral studies at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

Institute of Technology, Zimmerman was named a Corporate Associate Fellow. In 1990, she earned a doctorate in computer science, specializing in computational and recursion theory. Zimmerman completed her dissertation titled ''Classes of Grzegorczyk-Computable Real Numbers'' under her doctoral advisor

Marian Pour-El Marian Boykan Pour-El (April 29, 1928 – June 10, 2009) was an American mathematical logician who did pioneering work in computable analysis. Early life and education Marian Boykan was born in 1928 in New York City; her parents were dentist Josep ...

Career

Zimmerman joined the faculty at

in 1990 as a visiting professor. She was the principal investigator for the "Computer Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Scholarship Program" where she received $220,000 from the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

to be conducted between January 2002 – December 2005. Zimmerman has run the Goucher Robotics Lab since 2006. She is the James M. Beall Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Goucher College.

Personal life

In 1985, Zimmerman married computer science professor James Gil de Lamadrid.

Selected works

* * *

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Zimmerman, Jill 1959 births Living people Place of birth missing (living people) University of Minnesota alumni Goucher College faculty and staff Purdue University alumni American women computer scientists American computer scientists 21st-century American women scientists 20th-century American women scientists People from Naperville, Illinois American women academics