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Judith Selvidge | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1940 [1] |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Business School, Imperial College London |
| Known for | Research, memoir |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | MIT, Harvard Business School, JPL, Imperial College London, IBM |
| Patrons | Marvin Minsky |
| Thesis | Assigning probabilities to rare events (1972) |
Judith Selvidge is an American researcher, author, and MIT alumna known for her work on decision science, computer programming for radars, risk management, and her memoir I Didn't Know They Had Girls at MIT: MIT Diary [2] [1].
Early Life and Family
Selvidge was born in 1940 in Kansas. She had three siblings. Her father, an MIT alumnus, worked at the University of Kansas and helped develop a radio-based proximity fuze for the military during World War Two [1]. She moved around a lot during her childhood, starting out in Washington, D. C., then moving to New Jersey. As a teen, she moved to Michigan, then California.
Education
Selvidge studied initially at Mills College, a college for girls, later applying to and being rejected by Radcliffe College (now Harvard University). This prompted her to apply to MIT. She remembers her time at MIT being characterized by the small number of other female students and general male-dominated atmosphere [1][3], but she especially enjoyed taking a class by Marvin Minsky. She found chemistry particularly trying, having not had a background in it from high school, specifically recounting finding the lectures confusing and burning her hand on glassware in her memoir [2].
After graduating from MIT, she worked briefly at JPL, then applied to Imperial College London, where she earned a diploma in statistics and operational research. Her work there was on statistics, including analysis of military data (although she was not told the source of the data until later) [1].
After Imperial, she found in her work at Massachusetts General Hospital that having a more advanced degree would be helpful to her career, so she eventually got her doctorate from Harvard Business School with a thesis on statistics and probability, with a focus on risks associated with rare catastrophic events, work that would serve her well in later jobs [4].
Career and Research
Selvidge's first job after university was at JPL working on the Goldstone radio astronomy complex, where she did programming on punchcards under Frank Drake [1][5]. Her first published research work came from this job, a paper on measuring carbon dioxide intensity, intended to be used for interpreting radio astronomy data collected from the planet Venus in the Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer [6].
After JPL, she worked at other parts of NASA on programming for radars, then later went to business consulting, applying her academic skill in statistics to risk management [1].
Her published research works focus on radiation monitoring and other applications of statistics to risk [1], with works continuing her thesis research on the probabilities of rare events [7].
Memoir
Selvidge's memoir I Didn't Know They Had Girls at MIT: MIT Diary [2] focuses on her experiences as a rare female student at MIT, including the social atmosphere and classes. The memoir is formatted as a day-by-day diary of her entire time at the university.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Lin, Sharon; Selvidge, Judith Elizabeth. "Judith Selvidge (interviewed by Sharon Lin)". MIT Libraries: Dome. Association of MIT Alumnae (AMITA). Retrieved 28 November 2023.
- ^ a b c Selvidge, Judith (June 16, 2014). I Didn't Know They Had Girls at MIT: MIT Diary (1st edition (June 16, 2014) ed.). Galois Press. ISBN B00L2M7WDI. Retrieved 28 November 2023.
{{cite book}}: Check|isbn=value: invalid character (help) - ^ Gray, Robert M. "Coeducation at MIT: 1950s-1970s" (PDF). Stanford University Professor - Robert M Gray. Stanford Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Retrieved 28 November 2023.
- ^ Selvidge, Judith (1972). "Assigning probabilities to rare events". Unpublished dissertation. Retrieved 17 December 2023.
- ^ Victor, W. K.; Stevens, R. (1962). "The 1961 JPL Venus Radar Experiment". IRE Transactions on Space Electronics and Telemetry. SET-8 (2): 84–97. doi:10.1109/IRET-SET.1962.5008814. ISSN 0096-252X.
- ^ Gray, L. D.; Selvidge, Judith E. (1965-03-01). "Relative intensity calculations for carbon dioxide". Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer. 5 (2): 291–301. doi:10.1016/0022-4073(65)90065-8. ISSN 0022-4073.
- ^ Selvidge, Judith (1975). "A Three-Step Procedure for Assigning Probabilities to Rare Events". Utility, Probability, and Human Decision Making: Selected Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Research Conference, Rome, 3–6 September, 1973: 199–216. doi:10.1007/978-94-010-1834-0_11.