Nominated by: Rose Hepworth

I am nominating Professor Janis Jefferies in the Computing Department at Goldsmiths. Janis trained as a painter, is a big deal in contemporary textiles research, and is Professor of Visual Arts in our department. She has contributed a huge amount to the department and to Goldsmiths. She is a role model for me for her feminism, her professional achievements, and because no matter how busy she is, she always has time to help and encourage others. I remember her finding time in her day to help me prepare for my viva at another university last year and I will always be grateful to her.

Janis is a co-curator of the Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art.

Nominated by: Janis Jefferies

Anita Borg, the founding director of the Institute for Women and Technology (IWT). Anita Borg died sadly in April of 2003 from brain cancer at the age of 54. Beginning in 1997, the institute was supported and funded by Xerox. Her goals for the institute were threefold:

• bring non-technical women into the design process
• encourage more women to become scientists
• and help the industry, academia, and the government accelerate these changes.

Nominated by: Marco Gillies

JustineCassell has really influenced my work over the years with her fantastic work on modelling human non-verbal behaviour, work that really integrates computational work with very human behaviour.

Rosalind Picard: also does that in a different way. Her work on “Affective Computing”, i.e. computing and the emotions, applies hard core engineering to the very human problem of emotion.

Finally, I’d like to mention one of Rosalind’s collaborators, Rana El Kaliouby, who did her PhD in the same lab as me and I had to honour once to present some of her fantastic work on emotion recognition at a conference.

Nominated by: Wendy McDonald

I’d like to nominate Professor Dame Wendy Hall – I only recently came across her and her work through listening to ‘The Life Scientific’. It was fantastic to hear her talk about her route to becoming such a prominent computer scientist having originally thought that computers had nothing much to offer her. Not only is she a hugely intelligent and successful scientist but she also sounds like an inspirational manager – leading the School of Electronics and Computer Science from 2002 to 2007, during which time the department lost much of its work and infrastructure in a severe fire.

I also had to nominate her as she shares my name and it’s not often that you come across another Wendy, especially in the STEM world.

 

 

Nominated by: Brock Craft, Computing Dept

I think Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley put the “HER” in Hero because she was one of the pioneers of supporting women in Computing. She founded a software company called Freelance Programmers in 1962 to help women obtain work opportunities. It was an ideal fit for women supporting children and directly challenged the pervasive attitude that women weren’t suited to highly technical roles. Like many of her predecessors, Dame Shirley adopted a male name to get her in the door, surprising some of her prospective clients as she walked into boardrooms. Her company won major government contracts, designed scheduling and shipping software, and determined the statistical analyses for the black box sensor array on Concorde.