Alicia Carolina Beylan Navarrete | Deliveroo
I'm a recent graduate of Computer Science with Robotics from King's College London.
I've been a software engineer at Deliveroo for 6 months and recently got awarded an exceptional talent visa sponsored by TechNation. I'm part of the All-Party Parliamentary Group in AI where we get to discuss important topics such as ethics, education, privacy and others and how they will be impacted by AI.
During my time at university I was the president of KCL Tech Society, one of the biggest tech societies in the UK where my main focus was to teach people from different backgrounds how to code by having weekly workshops where we taught them android, ios and web, to encourage everyone regardless of their level of experience to learn something new and practice new skills by organising hackathons and hack days.
During the weekends I travel across Europe supporting and mentoring student hackathons where I get to teach and support students in learning new technologies and building projects from scratch providing them the resources they need.
Charlotte Haines | Barclays
I lead the Digital Security programme within Barclays Technology, which focuses on protecting the Bank’s corporate clients against fraudulent activity.
To date this has included the below notable deliveries:
- The Barclays Biometric Reader, which leverages finger vein technology to authenticate a user – a technology which it has not yet been possible to hack or imitate and has seen Barclays become the first Bank to offer this form of authentication
- Deployment of behavioural biometrics to mitigate against remote access attacks
- Creation of a generic security application that allows a consistent approach to cyber security across the Bank’s corporate products alongside the ability to react quickly to any emerging attack vectors
Alongside this, I am a keen advocate and participant of the Barclays’ gender equality network (WIN) where I have co-led the Gender Intelligence, Women on Boards and Speed Mentoring initiatives.
Outside of Barclays, I am actively involved in both gender and generational diversity. Notably, this has included presenting at the Whitehall & Industry Group Diversity & Inclusion conference as well as being invited to discuss diversity in the workplace at the 2018 Rustat Conference on Reconfiguring Careers (led by the University of Cambridge) as well as being one of the WeAreTheCity’s TechWomen100 winners in 2018.
Hannah Blair | Deutsche Bank / vrcalm
I recently graduated from University of Surrey with a BSc. in Computer Science and am a now full-time software developer at Deutsche Bank, while running a healthtech startup in my free time, vrcalm, which is a Virtual Reality experience for people with dementia, having won a Women in Technology Scholarship from Sky.
I love blogging about technology and am a public speaker on the topic of Virtual Reality and diversity in technology.
Ekaterini Tasiopoulou | IBM
Katerina Tasiopoulou was born in Greece, and is a graduate of Computer Science from Royal Holloway University of London.
She has experience with the creation and research of cryptosystems, malware systems and penetration testing. She is a very qualified programmer in a variety of languages, having developed games, websites, apps and robots.
Katerina works in IBM, and is currently a Client Engagement Lead in Europe, for X-Force IRIS (Incident Response and Intelligence Services). As part of this team, IRIS responds to security incidents globally and helps organisations contain and recover from cyber attacks. Katerina is recently focusing on business development strategy and proactive services; converting this real life experience and intelligence into training exercises to help train clients in advance.
Katerina enjoys public speaking, mentoring others, and anything related to astrophysics!
Love Oyeniran | LRO Consults
Having studied a Social Science degree, my first role after leaving university was working with a workflow automation tool to drive process efficiencies.
I designed and developed the application, integrating to other systems such as Slack and Tableau, and I was able to write my first lines of code! In doing this I was able to increase my understanding of the use of different programming languages, applications and software.
From that role, I moved to another finance organisation where I took ownership of technology changes as part of a major system upgrade and a redesign of an in-house application.
Outside of my day job, I have been on many professional coding courses with Code First Girls where I was keen to learn as much as possible from GIT version control to connecting with APIs. This appetite to learn more proven invaluable and my most recent role as an RPA consultant, where I worked alongside a team who were among the first to put robots in an Investment Bank. I have worn many hats as part of an automation delivery, comprising of business and process analyst, risk and strategy and also detailing technical solution documents comprising of Sudo code, which has not only provided a steep learning opportunity but had made my job both exciting and enjoyable.
My most recent challenge includes developing an application hub that acts as a personalised virtual assistant. Having been recently awarded as a TechWoman, coupled with dealing with my father’s health complications, I was propelled to make an app that facilitates a proactive and mindful approach to ensuring good health and lifestyle.
Rebeka Marton | Deloitte
I started university in 2013 with a very exciting educational background, having attended school both in Hungary and the UK, alternating every few years.
It set me up with a desire to be constantly challenged and be exposed to new things, meet new people and make friends that would need to last over distance and time. I graduated with a Natural Sciences degree from Cambridge, where still I enjoyed the variety of knowledge that I could learn the most. It also left me with a burning curiosity to learn programming and become a developer - an area that at that time was still mysterious and out of reach; yet at the same time amazing and powerful, since it can enable so much good in today’s society at very little cost. I joined Deloitte Digital as an engineer - and from their first coding bootcamp to now I have had the chance to both learn an incredible amount, and become a valuable member of my project team at work - I have effectively become its beating heart. On the project, that I have watched grow almost since its inception, despite my relatively junior position, I have been able to lead various work streams, while also taking ownership for building and maintaining various core components of the platform.
The best part for me, however, is being able to pass on my understanding and my undying enthusiasm for solving problems with my colleagues, inspiring and encouraging particularly those that seem shy or hesitant. This passion for spreading my curiosity in programming, and the reason why I was drawn to this art in the first place, can be seen in my outside-of-project activities. I love hackathons, side projects to build awesome products that have amazing impact, whether that is about reaching out to society to raise awareness, inspire and drive solutions to large scale problems, or solving people's individual problems directly. I also really enjoy teaching, so have been involved with Coder Dojo events - which I can only recommend - and teaching Python to children on Saturdays whenever I can. Inspiring others to learn and be ambitious is probably the greatest privilege one can experience!
Martha Imprialou | QuantumBlack
After completing a diploma in Computer Engineering Diploma at the National Technical University of Athens, I moved to the UK where I completed a master’s degree in Computer Science and then a PhD in Statistics at the University of Oxford.
I went on to postdoctoral research role at Imperial College London, where my research involved analysis of DNA sequencing data to better understand the genetics of autoimmune diseases.
I joined QuantumBlack in 2016 as a Data Scientist, where I worked across projects that drove business decisions for clients by building advanced analytics and machine learning models. I leveraged my technical skills, initially developing machine learning models to optimise R&D procedures for pharmaceutical clients, before broadening my experience to work across the automotive, financial services and banking sectors.
I was promoted twice in less than two years and was appointed first as Senior Data Scientist and then Jr Principal Data Scientist, leading the technical development of projects and harnessing analytics to deliver strategic problem-solving for clients.
In April 2018 I was promoted again to Analytics Engagement Manager. This was a significant transition, as it involved taking on full end-to-end responsibility for leading and delivering client projects - rather than a purely technical position, I was now responsible for leading a team comprised of data scientists, engineers, designers and developers. Moreover, it saw me take on a hybrid leadership role, communicating between QuantumBlack’s project teams and our clients. This involved engaging with a range of different stakeholders across our client organisations, from operations to C-suite, discussing their commercial challenges while also communicating how our deeply technical analytics work could help them address these issues.
Despite only joining QuantumBlack three years ago, I have become one of the most rapidly promoted employees in the organisation’s history and was the first employee to transition from an analytics-focused technical role into this hybrid management position.
Claire Donoghue | 3M
Dr Claire Donoghue works the Corporate Research Lab at 3M, where she is researching disruptive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence(AI) and computer vision to invent and engineer new products.
Prior to this she completed her PhD in computer vision and machine learning at Imperial College London. Computer vision is a discipline in which engineers teach a computer to “see” and interpret images, giving computers capabilities analogous to human vision.
Her first major innovation was during her PhD, where she created world leading computer vision algorithms to automatically diagnose arthritis of the knee from medical scans. For this academic work, Claire received 9 prizes for excellence in research and communication, a fellowship from the Software Sustainability Institute and was awarded two research grants to continue developing these algorithms for commercialisation. The most prestigious competition was SET for Britain (now STEM for Britain) and targeted the public communication of science, held at the Houses of Parliament, attended by MPs and awarded by the RAEng.
Claire co-founded and directed the London Chapter of the Geekettes. The London Geekettes goal is to champion and promote excellent women in technology, highlighting the achievements of inspirational female leaders. She conceived and hosted events, attended by 100-300 people, usually ‘sold’ out, collaborating with contacts in industry (Facebook, Google, Winton Capital and more) to fund the events and secure event space. One of the most memorable events was a hackathon for girls aged between 6 and 16, where they transformed creative ideas in to reality using Scratch and Python. Claire also supports collaborators’ STEM events by presenting her engineering work at Science Festivals and evening events.
Claire actively participates in technical communities outside of 3M. She regularly attends technical conferences, has been a keen participant in several hackathons and co-MC’ed London’s TechCrunch Disrupt Hack 2016 and Berlin TechCrunch Hack 2017, both attended by hundreds of software engineers.
Gemma Emmett | Bluewolf, an IBM Company
I graduated in 2005 with a degree in Business Information Systems from the University of Northampton.
I started off working in reporting roles, first for an exam board, then an airline, and finally with an international credit risk agency, where I was given administrative responsibility for their CRM system, a fairly young platform called Salesforce. After 18 months or so, I decided that I really loved working with this online system and decided to go consulting. Over the following 8 years, I worked on implementing Salesforce at a variety of companies large and small. As the sector grew, so did the complexity of the projects, and so did my level of experience and certification. Just as I was starting to become known as a trusted expert, I had my first interruption. A stage 3 breast cancer diagnosis, a week before my wedding and 4 months before my 30th birthday.
A year of treatment followed - months of chemotherapy, surgery, radiotherapy and hormone therapy - until I was told the immediate threat had passed. I carried on working throughout most of it, because it gave me a welcome distraction. But my soap opera life wasn't done with me yet. My marriage broke down, but my career went from strength to strength, culminating in arriving where I am now and taking a role as a solution architect to design Salesforce and integrations with other systems. Now that cancer had been dealt with, and in an effort to prove myself a credible practitioner, I decided to start strengthening my personal credentials through certification. 10 years of experience in Salesforce stood me in good stead to get from 5 certifications to 16 within a 3-month period. As I completed each exam, I started blogging tips and pointers from each experience, so that others could benefit from the insight as they also pursued their studies.
The only problem was, I noticed, there weren't many other women in my position who were tackling some of the more difficult exams. Where WAS everybody? Ladies Be Architects was born. This opened doors for me within IBM, within the thriving Salesforce community and started to give new experiences. Winning the coveted Golden Hoodie award. Winning a TechWomen 100 award. Speaking at Salesforce's annual conference in San Francisco four times. Having people all over the world read and share my blog posts. And then, last year, I had the news that we hadn't got all of the breast cancer out. It had come back. So, I had a few months off to recover from a double mastectomy with reconstruction before bouncing back.
Sotira Georgiou | Ramboll UK
My name is Sotira Georgiou and I am a Structural Engineer at Ramboll UK with five years of experience in the construction sector.
In 2013, I graduated with First-Class in B.Eng. (Hons) Civil Engineering and in 2014 I graduated with a Distinction in M.Sc. Civil Engineering both from the University of Southampton. I am a co-author of a paper in International Conference on Advanced Composites in Construction (ACIC2013).
For the past five years I have been a valued member of Ramboll Southampton Building Structures Team. I have a lead structural role within multidisciplinary teams, designing buildings in the UK and abroad and managing the delivery of the structural design. My experience involves conceptual and detailed design of new buildings (including multi-storey mixed use, retail and offices), refurbishment of existing structures, structural surveys and seismic design. I will be sitting the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) Chartered Professional Review in April 2019.
I am the Lead of Ramboll UK STEM Network as part of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee and a passionate and enthusiastic STEM Ambassador with an active role of inspiring the younger generation on the importance of STEM subjects.