Jill Zimmerman

Jill Loraine Zimmerman is an American computer scientist and the James M. Beall Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Goucher College. Since 2006, she has been the head of the Goucher Robotics Lab.

Early life and education Zimmerman is from Naperville, Illinois. While in high school in 1975, Zimmerman and her father built a computer with four kilobytes of memory after being inspired by the January cover story of Popular Mechanics by Ed Roberts on building your own computers. Zimmerman later remarked that it was this same article that inspired Bill Gates.

In 1981, Zimmerman earned a Bachelor of Science with distinction in Computer and Informational Sciences with a minor in Mathematics from Purdue University. In 1990, she earned a doctorate in computer science, specializing in computational and recursion theory. Zimmerman completed her dissertation titled Classes of Grzegorczyk-Computable Real Numbers under her doctoral advisor Marian Pour-El. She was the principal investigator for the "Computer Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Scholarship Program" where she received $220,000 from the National Science Foundation to be conducted between January 2002 – December 2005.

Zimmerman's research in computer science spans programming languages, compiler design, and robotics, with notable collaboration with Gil de Lamadrid.

Selected works