Carol G. Maclennan
- Death date
- 2020/08/25
- Associated organizations
- Bell Labs
- Fields of study
- Geophysics
Biography
Born 30 September 1938, Carol G. Maclennan grew up in Bound Brook, New Jersey. Her physicist father supported her early interest in math and science, portending a successful career in a field still lacking women. While still an undergraduate at Pembroke College, she completed an internship with the Bell Labs acoustics department, to which she returned in 1960 for a lengthy stay. Excluding a brief period of employment on the computing staff of Cornell University, Maclennan worked at Bell Labs until her retirement in 2001. During her career, she was a collaborator on the projects of Walter L. Brown and Louis J. Lanzerotti, with whom she worked on the block diagram (BLODI) compiler for speech processing and on spacecraft data analysis related to the Pioneer and Voyager Missions project.
In 1980 Maclennan advanced to the position of MTS (member of technical staff) at Bell Labs, working on instrument fieldwork for the magnetometer in Greenland and the Antarctic, and then on satellite communications. She was also involved in processing the data from the Ulysses spacecraft until its expiration in 2007.
Maclennan published more than two hundred papers on a variety of topics in geophysics.
Further Reading
To read Carol Maclennan's story in her own words, see Bell Labs Memoirs: Voices of Innovation
Carol G. Maclennan Oral History
