Stephanie Forrest
The researcher who borrowed the immune system's notion of "self versus non-self" and turned it into intrusion detection.
Stephanie Forrest did her PhD under John Holland, father of genetic algorithms, and carried biology into computer security at the University of New Mexico. In 1994 she described negative selection: generate detectors that do not match normal behaviour, much as T-cells are weeded out before they can attack the body's own tissue.
Her most cited work is A Sense of Self for Unix Processes (1996). Short sequences of system calls turned out to be a remarkably stable fingerprint of a program's normal behaviour, and deviations caught attacks no signature knew about. Anomaly detection built on that idea now ships in just about every EDR product, false positives included. She later co-created GenProg (2009), which repairs bugs through genetic programming.