After her Bachelor from Saint John"s College in 1977, Forrest studied Computer and Communication Sciences at the University of Michigan, where she received her Mississippi in 1982 and in 1985 her Doctor of Philosophy with a thesis entitled "A study of parallelism in the classifier system and its application to classification in KL-ONE semantic networks.".
She is best known for her work in adaptive systems, including genetic algorithms, computational immunology, biological modeling, automated software repair, and computer security. After graduation Forrest started worked for Teknowledge Incorporated. and worked at the Center for Nonlinear Studies of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 1990 she joined the University of New Mexico, where she is appointed Professor of Computer Science and directs the Computer Immune Systems Group, ad the Adaptive Computation Laboratory.
From 2006 to 2011 she chaired the Computer Science Department.
In the 1990s she is also affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute, where she was Interim Vice President in the year 1999 to 2000. Forrest has authored and co-authored many publications in her field of expertise.
A selection:
Forrest, Stephanie, et al. "Self-nonself discrimination in a computer." Research in Security and Privacy, 1994.
Proceedings., 1994 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society Symposium on.
Ieee, 1994. Forrest, Stephanie, et al. "A sense of self for unix processes." Security and Privacy, 1996.
Proceedings., 1996 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Symposium on.
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 1996. Hofmeyr, Steven A., Stephanie Forrest, and Anil Somayaji. "Intrusion detection using sequences of system calls." Journal of computer security 6.3 (1998): 151-180.
Warrender, Christina, Stephanie Forrest, and Barak Pearlmutter.
"Detecting intrusions using system calls: Alternative data models." Security and Privacy, 1999. Proceedings of the 1999 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Symposium on. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 1999. Hofmeyr, Steven A., and Stephanie Forrest.
"Architecture for an artificial immune system." Evolutionary computation 8.4 (2000): 443-473.
A more complete list can be found on Doctor Forrest"s website.
Forrest was awarded in 1991 the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, in 2009 the IFIP TC2 Manfred Paul Award for Excellence in Software, and in 2011 the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) - Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Allen Newell Award.
