Inspiration in a rain forest

"I have great respect for theoreticians, but I need to know that what I'm doing will eventually be usable."
Deborah Estrin

After graduating from University High School in West Los Angeles, Deborah Estrin earned a bachelor of science degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980. She went on to earn a master's degree in technology policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1982. Three years later, Estrin completed the PhD program in computer science at MIT.

After graduating from MIT, Estrin headed back to the West Coast to begin her teaching career. During 1986 she accepted a position as professor of computer science at the University of Southern California (USC), where she taught and conducted research until 2000.

During 1999 Estrin vacationed in Costa Rica, home to lush tropical rain forests. She was awed by the abundant animal and plant life in the rain forests and by the admirable focus of the Costa Rican government and people on preserving their country's biodiversity. Estrin realized that biologists could radically improve their ability to observe complex biological phenomena by using embedded networked sensors. Upon returning from Costa Rica, Estrin began to focus on the impact ENS could have on the study of biology, the environment, and other natural sciences. Among many other uses, ENS could help scientists track and monitor the impact of climate change on endangered ecosystems—a community of organisms and the surrounding environment—and could provide detailed information about the type and level of contamination in the soil or air. In 2000 Estrin left USC to become a professor of computer science at UCLA. As with all scientific endeavors, Estrin's research in the field of ENS depended on funding to carry it from the planning stages to actual testing of the sensing devices in the real world. Soon after joining the faculty at UCLA, she and several colleagues from UCLA, USC, and other universities began working on a massive grant proposal that would give them the funding they needed.

During August of 2002, Estrin and her colleagues heard the news they had anxiously awaited for many months, news of a grant the likes of which most scientists can only dream of: the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Science and Technology Center awarded them a ten-year, $40 million grant to develop ENS technologies for the study of physical and biological systems. The grant allowed for the establishment of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), and Estrin was named the center's first director. Based at UCLA, CENS was one of six academic research centers to receive the 2002 NSF grant, which specifies that the work must be collaborative, involving people from various fields of study. Estrin's center includes professors from a number of different departments at UCLA and other universities, including computer science, electrical engineering, biology, and education. In exchange for the grant money, the research centers must commit to conducting their primary research, and to advancing educational opportunities in local schools and universities and increasing the number of minorities participating in the research. They must also connect with other research institutions as well as the business world and the surrounding community. CENS was ready and able to fulfill the many requirements, and work soon began on developing the initial programs for testing ENS technology.

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Deborah Estrin delivered the keynote at the UMass Boston Center for Coastal Environmental Sensing Networks inaugural conference in April 2007.