November 11, 1947 - August 14, 1997 - Diana fell while crossing a river in Alaska
Diana Forsythe, a leading researcher at the University of California at San Francisco, was three days into a group hike in the mountainous terrain of northern Alaska when she lost her footing in the glacier-fed Sadlerochit River.
She slipped out of her backpack and struggled to swim to a sand bar, only to be carried by the fast-moving, icy waters around a bend and out of sight.
Forsythe's body was found 2 1/2 miles downstream after the accident Thursday. Apparently her head struck a rock while being carried downstream.
Diana was the daughter of the late, George E. Forsythe, founder of the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and the wife of Dr. Bern Shen, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at UCSF. She is survived by her husband, Dr. Bern Shen, her brother, Warren "Tuck" Forsythe (w. Kay) and a niece and nephew.
Early Life:
Forsythe was born in 1947 in Santa Monica, California to computer scientists, Alexandra Illmer Forsythe and George Forsythe. Her family moved to Palo Alto, California in 1957 and she attended Palo Alto High School. She attended Swarthmore College receiving her bachelors degree in anthropology and sociology and earned her PhD in cultural anthropology and social demography from Cornell University in 1974. She completed fieldwork in Scotland and produced a number of papers on anthropology in Europe before turning her attention to knowledge engineering and medical informatics in the United States. She spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University from 1987 to 1988. She worked as a research associate professor in the computer science and anthropology departments at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty at UCSF. In 1994 she returned to Stanford as a visiting scholar for one year and then as a Systems Development Foundation Fellow at the Center for Biomedical Ethics in 1995. During this period she also started an oral history project focusing on the experiences of women in computer science.
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