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Biography · Science & Inventions

Deborah Washington Brown

1952–2020

United States

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Biography

Deborah Washington Brown (June 3, 1952 – June 5, 2020) was an American computer scientist who worked at AT&T Bell Labs in speech recognition research. She became the first black woman to earn a doctorate in computer science (then a part of their applied math program) at Harvard University in 1981, and was one of the first black female computer scientists to graduate from a US doctoral program.

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Black heritage reference ↗

Biography text · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source checked 2026-10-13

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