Betty Flehinger

Betty Jeanne Flehinger-Schultz (née Isaacs, c. 1922 – May 21, 2000) was a biostatistician known for her research on clinical decision support systems and cancer screening. She worked for many years for IBM Research.^[1]

Education and career

Betty Jeanne Isaacs is a 1941 graduate of Barnard College,^[2][3] where she was founder and president of the college's physics club.^[3] She earned a master's degree in physics from Cornell University in 1942 with a thesis titled A Revision of the Isotopic Mass Scale.^[2][4] As Betty Flehinger, she completed a Ph.D. in 1961 from Columbia University. Her dissertation, A General Model for the Reliability Analysis of Systems under Various Preventive Maintenance Policies, was supervised by Ronald Pyke.^[2][5]

She joined IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1957,^[2] initially working on data analysis for the prediction of the reliability of computing devices.^[6] By 1964 she was manager for probability and statistics in the mathematical sciences department of the center.^[2]

Recognition

Flehinger's work with Ralph Engle developing the HEME computer system using Bayesian statistics to diagnose blood diseases has been named as a landmark by the International Medical Informatics Association.^[7] Flehinger was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1968,^[8] and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1996.^[9]