Ellen Catherine Hildreth is a professor of computer science at Wellesley College. Her fields are visual perception and computer vision. She co-invented the Marr-Hildreth algorithm along with David Marr. She completed all of her higher education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics in 1977, a Master of Science from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) in 1980, and a Ph.D. from EECS in 1983. Her thesis, "The Measurement of Visual Motion", won an Honorable Mention from the Association for Computing Machinery.