Stella Atkins

Atkins grew up in England with an intense interest in math. Her father was an engineer and her mother, a statistician. She enjoyed reading math books for fun but because her sister was studying mathematics in college, she wanted to take a different route and pursued chemistry studies instead.^[3] When choosing a university, Atkins chose University of Nottingham in England, because chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, who had just received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was there.^[4]

After Atkins received her B.Sc. in chemistry from Nottingham University (1966),^[1] she went on to work at the Shell Refining Company as a chemical engineer. There she performed simulations of oil refineries and oil flow, and developed her interest in computing.^[4]

Atkins later became a scientific computer programmer advisor at the University of Warwick^[4] in England and received her M.Phil. in computer science from there in 1976.^[1] In 1985, Atkins received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of British Columbia.^[1]

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