Janice Jenkins

Janice M. Jenkins (1932–2023) was an American electrical engineer and biomedical engineer, the first woman to become a faculty member in the University of Michigan Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Her research concerned electrocardiology and the automated analysis of heart rhythms.

Life and work

Jenkins was originally from Flint, Michigan, and grew up in a family of three sisters in Alton, Illinois. She married in 1951 and raised a family of five children.

She entered college at the same time as her oldest child, at age 37. She studied at the University of Illinois Chicago, earning a bachelor's degree in 1974, a master's degree in 1976, and a Ph.D. in 1978. Just before receiving her final degree, her husband died.

After becoming an assistant professor of electrical engineering, computer science, and medicine at Northwestern University, she moved to the University of Michigan in 1980. She became a full professor there in 1992. She directed the medical computing research laboratory from 1981 to 2002 and the digital design laboratory from 1983 to 1998. She became the advisor of 20 doctoral students, among them biometric expert Stephanie Schuckers.

She retired as a professor emerita in 2002, and returned to Chicago in her retirement. She died on December 29, 2023.

Recognition

Jenkins was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 1994, "for outstanding technical contributions and training of students in electrocardiology, including computer techniques for automatic arrhythmia analysis". She was also elected as an IEEE Fellow in 1995 and as a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology in 1998.

When Rada Mihalcea was named as a collegiate professor of computer science in 2020, she chose her professorship to be named in honor of Jenkins.