Alice Kamakaokalani Herrmann (sometimes known as Anne, Alix and Alyx), died December 4, 2023, aged 61, in Capitola, California.
Born March 15, 1962, in Los Angeles, Alyx achieved BA Physics/Astronomy, Pomona College (‘84); BS Engineering and Applied Science, Caltech (‘84); PhD Computational Neuroscience, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, ‘01); she taught as Professor at EIVD, a school of the Western Switzerland University of Applied Sciences (HES-SO).
Alyx is survived by her child, Dorothy Kamahelenopolikua Scheurer, father Cal, and brothers Eric and Conrad.
Alyx lived in California, New Jersey, France, and Switzerland, and planned to retire to Hana, Maui, Hawaii, the home of her parents and ancestors.
After graduating from Caltech (BS, ‘84), Alyx worked at NASA’s JPL on the Magellan Venus surface mapping project, contributing Radar Synthetic Aperture Radar algorithms and architecting Magellan RDPS.
In 1990, Alyx moved to Switzerland to work at a Swiss tech company, Logitech. While raising her child in Lausanne, Alyx earned her PhD (EPFL, ‘01) in Computational Neuroscience, defending her thesis in fluent French. She contributed to research in medical imaging and to Neural Java, and published papers on neuron signal response.
In 2005, Alyx kicked off her tech-startup career: in Lausanne at ABMI, and, moving back to California, Agility Design, Ansca Mobile, minds.ai, Instinet, and finally, Four-Twenty-Seven, a climate-change risk analytics firm.
Alyx drew meaning and community from other interests: Bass guitar, Chess, Go, Fencing, Taekwondo (earning 3rd dan), and Outrigger canoe paddling. In recent years, Alyx competed in outrigger canoe races in Hawaii and Tahiti with the Santa Cruz, California-based Outrigger Canoe Club.
Alyx was a rock star, a rocket scientist, a brain surgeon, a martial arts master, and a finance wizard.
A celebration of life was held Feb 25, 2024 at Temescal Lake Beach House, Oakland, California.
