Alumni Profile: Elaine N. Frankowski

Ph.D. (1982)
M.S. (1979)


Personal Information

retired into a life as wife, mother, grandmother, volunteer and pursuer of the intellectual byways that were neglected during my professional life.

Professional Information

3/1998 - present: Fourth Judicial District, Juvenile Division, Guardian ad Litem. A volunteer, court appointed, advocate in the county juvenile court, working with neglected and abused children. I speak in their best interests during court proceedings between Hennepin County and their adult parents or guardians, after a thorough investigation of their circumstances, needs and the issues that brought them to the attention of the Department of Children and Family Services.

7/1997: retired from computer science profession

7/1992 - 7/1997: Instrumental Inc., Vice President of Software Development. Led planning, design, development and porting of computer performance tool. (In 1992-3, four versions released and tool ported to three additional platforms.) Then led new product development and further ports of existing product. Involved in day to day corporate operations, long range planning and staffing. Responsible for line management of developers and monitoring of software development process.

Director of Software Development. Defined company's first software development process. Defined requirements and schedule for bringing prototype to product status. Coordinated development, including design, coding, documentation, testing and distribution. Hired key developer.

1/1990 - 7/1992: Cray Research Inc., Manager of UniChem Software Development. Hired development team; defined development process and monitored its use; defined initial product requirements; coordinated development, including design, coding, documentation, testing and distribution. Designed product's user interface. Responsible for budget and line management of ten developers and support personnel.

10/1982 - 1/1990: Honeywell Computer Sciences Center, Senior Principal Research Scientist. Chief designer of the Engineering Information System User Interface Management System (Air Force Contract F33615-87-C-1401). Defined software engineering process and tools for distributed application development. Led project to develop an application generator for programming automated test equipment.

Principal Research Scientist. Led project that defined and prototyped a rapid prototyping system for investigating end user requirements for embedded systems. Extended Honeywell's design specification language to support temporal specifications.