Stephanie Forrest

Stephanie Forrest is a Professor of Computer Science at Arizona State University and serves as Director of the Biodesign Center for Biocomputation, Security and Society. She holds affiliations with the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Global Futures Laboratory, and Santa Fe Institute External Faculty.

Education:

• B.A. from St. John's College
• M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan

Research Interests:
Forrest specializes in the intersection of biology and computation, with key contributions to cybersecurity (anomaly detection, instruction-set randomization), automated software repair (evolutionary methods), and biological modeling (immune systems, SARS-CoV-2 spread). Her work bridges complex adaptive systems, AI/ML, and defense applications.

Scientific Contributions:

• 2020 IEEE S&P Test of Time Award
• 2019 ICSE Most Influential Paper Award
• 2011 ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award
• NSF Presidential Young Investigator (1991)
• IEEE Fellow
• Evolutionary Computation Pioneer award

Publications & Grants:
Her research appears in top venues (ICSE, IEEE S&P, PNAS) and is funded by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, Air Force Research Lab, and Santa Fe Institute. Key projects include Crispy (CRISPR-inspired DoS defense), GenProg (automated bug correction), and SIMCoV-GPU (agent-based pandemic modeling).