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Judith Selvidge is an American researcher and author known for her work on decision science, computer programming for radars, and risk management. She is also known for her memoir I Didn't Know They Had Girls at MIT: MIT Diary, which recounts her time as one of the very few female students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s. .

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. 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, 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.

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).

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.

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. 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.

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.

Her published research works focus on radiation monitoring and other applications of statistics to risk, with works continuing her thesis research on the probabilities of rare events.

Memoir
Selvidge's memoir I Didn't Know They Had Girls at MIT: MIT Diary 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.

Category:Scientists Category:Researchers Category:Radio astronomers Category:Memoirists Category:People