Ellen Voorhees

Ellen Marie Voorhees (born March 13, 1958) is an American computer scientist known for her work in document retrieval, information retrieval, and natural language processing. She works in the retrieval group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Voorhees was born in Bensalem Township, Pennsylvania, and was the 1976 valedictorian at Bensalem High School. She did her undergraduate studies at Pennsylvania State University, graduating in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in computer science. She went to Cornell University for graduate school, earning a master's degree and completing her Ph.D. in 1985. Her dissertation, The Effectiveness and Efficiency of Agglomerative Hierarchic Clustering in Document Retrieval, was supervised by Gerard Salton.

She worked as a researcher for Siemens before joining NIST.

Voorhees was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2018 for "contributions in evaluation of information retrieval, question answering, and other language technologies".