In the 1960s, Sister Keller studied at the University of Wisconsin. She also studied at Purdue, the University of Michigan, and Dartmouth College. Dartmouth relaxed the rule barring women from its computer center, which allowed Keller to help develop the computer language BASIC. (Before BASIC, only mathematicians and scientists could write custom software; BASIC allowed anyone who could learn the language to do so, making computer use accessible to a much larger swath of the population.)
Keller’s dissertation, written in CDC FORTRAN 63, was titled "Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns." In 1965, she became the first American woman to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science.
