Beatrice Yormark was the daughter of Holocaust survivors, born on December 9th, 1944, in an Emergency Refugee Shelter in Oswego, N.Y. She grew up poor, in the Bronx, in New York City, where her family moved after WWII ended. Her mother worked as a seamstress in New York City's garment district, and her father had a heart condition which limited his employment prospects. Beatrice got a bachelor's degree in mathematics from City College of New York and went on to obtain a master's degree in computer science at Purdue University. She was among the first women to get a graduate degree in computer science at Purdue, and she was later honored as a Distinguished Alumna.

After obtaining her master degree, Beatrice worked at the Rand corporation. She left Rand with several others, to start InterActive Systems Corporation, selling commercialized versions of the Unix™ system; and later moved to Coopers & Lybrand, in Washington, DC, where she served as a director in the role of partner, in the Management Consulting side.

This was followed by brief stints as Director and VP of Engineering at startups in Schaumburg, Illinois, and in Cupertino, CA. In 1990 Beatrice Yormark joined Echelon Corporation, a San Jose maker of control and energy-saving networking equipment such as smart meters. She was first hired in 1990 as the Vice President of marketing and sales at Echelon, and eventually became President and Chief Operating Officer.

Beatrice passed away unexpectedly on May 3rd, 2008. Ken Oshman, Echelon’s Chairman and CEO said of her in a statement: “Bea was a brilliant strategist, an inspirational leader, a tough negotiator, and a caring friend. She was one of those rare people who made everyone around her better by inspiring them to find more in themselves than they knew was possible[...] We will miss her greatly; yet we will still see her every day in the people she mentored, the teams she built, the values she instilled, the technology she helped launch, and the company that she helped to lead for so long."