Date of birth: 1947
Date of death: 1997
Website:

DIANA ELIZABETH FORSYTHE, 49, died on August 14, 1997 , while hiking in Alaska. Crossing a fast-flowing river, she lost her footing and drowned.

Forsythe grew up on the Stanford campus, attended Swarthmore College and received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology and Social Demography from Cornell U (1974). She did postdoctoral study in artificial intelligence at Stanford U (1987-88). She was Associate Adjunct Professor in the Medical Anthropology Program at UCSF from 1995 until her death. Prior to moving to UCSF , Forsythe had been a Systems Development Foundation Fellow at Stanford, Visiting Scholar in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford, and Research Associate Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Earlier in her career she spent several years doing research and teaching at Oxford, the U Bielefeld, U Aberdeen, Scotland, U Cologne, and Lawrence U.

Forsythe was very active in professional service. She served for three years (1994-97) as the Program Chair for the Society for the Anthropology of Work, sat on the Council of the Society for the Social Study of Science, and was on the editorial boards of several interdisciplinary journals. She was the author of three books and nearly 3 dozen journal articles, book chapters, technical reports and other publications.

For the 10 years prior to her death, Forsythe worked at the boundaries of cultural anthropology, medicine and computer science, contributing to the interdisciplinary area that has come to be known as medical informatics. She was among the very first anthropologists or sociologists to collaborate with computer scientists, and to study in detail the work practices of computing. Her ethnographic work on software development in medical informatics revealed that cultural and disciplinary assumptions are routinely (but often unintentionally) designed into such software, potentially reducing the system's benefits to clinicians or patients. Her field research in neurology, internal medicine, emergency medicine and medical genetics illuminated the meaning of medical information and the information needs of providers and patients in specific real-world practice contexts, and suggested ways in which software and other technology might better meet those needs. She was actively engaged in several academic and industrial research and writing projects at the time of her death.

A lifelong Quaker, Forsythe strongly supported causes related to nonviolence, women's issues and social action. She is survived by her husband, Bern Shen. A memorial fund is being developed to support dissertation research by UCSF or Stanford students in the field of social studies of science and technology.

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