Dorothy Catherine Fontana, the legendary television writer better known by her gender-hiding nom de plume, D.C. Fontana, has passed away on December 2 at the age of 80, following a short illness, announces the official Star Trek site.

Even to casual fans of 1966-1969’s original Star Trek series who might be oblivious to the show’s behind-the-scenes stories, the name D.C. Fontana should ring a bell, since it was prominently and frequently affixed in the credits. While the story of her emergence in the monolithically male-dominated television industry of the 1960s is one that – especially now – seems destined for dramatization, Fontana’s contributions to the canon of the still-thriving bellwether sci-fi franchise also happened to be crucial.

Further Reading: Star Trek’s D.C. Fontana Talks the Origin of Spock’s Family

Fontana, who started on the Star Trek staff as a secretary, scripted several episodes of The Original Series (TOS) throughout the entirety of its run, starting with the early Season 1 episode, “Charlie X,” in which the Enterprise rescues a teen whose angst and lovelorn state doesn’t mesh well with his god-like powers. The episode was a groundbreaking exhibition of psychological nuance for a character who would otherwise be dismissed as evil. Fontana would field further scripting opportunities for crucial episodes (11 total,) such as “This Side of Paradise,” “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” “That Which Survives” and, perhaps most poignantly, “Journey to Babel,” the Season 2 episode that significantly fleshed out the entire Trek mythos by not only introducing Spock’s father, Sarek, and mother, Amanda, but also debuted alien races in the Andorians and Tellarites.