But Judelson brought more than the prin­ciples of engineering to her study of heart physiology; she also brought an intellectual rigor and adaptability that had been cultivated in her since her childhood in Patchogue, NY.

"My father loved to quiz us around the dinner table," recalls Judelson, who was the third of four children. "He'd say to us, 'Think of a number between 1 and 100 that can be divided by 11 and found in the living room." She solved that one as a kindergartner. And her talent for solving problems more complex than her father's piano puzzle would serve her well in clinical practice.

"I would see women coming in having trouble breathing, their heart muscles weakened," she says, recalling her days as a young doctor at ­Kaiser in Los Angeles. By combing through charts and pulling obscure papers from medical libraries, she began to decipher patterns suggesting that "these women had had heart attacks they never knew about."

That hypothesis launched a line of inquiry now in its third decade and a public-health campaign already in its second. Judelson says there's plenty more to be done in understanding microvascular disease in women, racial and ethnic variance in the incidence and morbidity of heart disease, and the effects of hormones and hormone therapies on women's hearts.

But she knows her work has made a difference: "I had a patient come in and ask me if I knew that heart disease was the number one cause of death among women. Or that 10 years ago, four out of five Americans didn't know that."

Judelson didn't tell her patient that she'd designed and popularized the survey she was citing. Instead, she said, "Tell me more about that." And the data gathering continued.