Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech, where she holds The Robert V. Tishman Founder's Chair, serves as the Associate Dean for Impact, and is an Affiliate Faculty at Weill Cornell Medicine. Estrin's research activities include technologies for caregiving, immersive health, small data, participatory sensing, and Public Interest Technology.

Before joining Cornell University Estrin was the Founding Director of the NSF Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at UCLA; pioneering the development of mobile and wireless systems to collect and analyze real time data about the physical world. Estrin co-founded the non-profit startup, Open mHealth, and has served on several scientific advisory boards for early stage mobile health startups. She is currently an Amazon Scholar (2019-present).

Estrin is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and was chosen as a 2018 fellow of the MacArthur Foundation.