Emma Martin | BT
I am a Software Engineer working in Digital Platforms, Consumer BT based in Belfast, a coding instructor at Coursera and a graduate with an MSc in Software Development from Queen’s University Belfast.
Before I discovered coding I worked in Marketing and gained a First Class Honours from Ulster University. During my time at university I worked at a local tech start-up the summer before I started my placement year I got my first insight into the world of technology and this kicked started my passion for wanting to learn how to code. I am an advocate for driving change within technology and have been involved a number of committees and boards including the Project Management Institute Northern Ireland Chapter, Women Who Code Belfast City Lead and IET Young Professionals Committee Belfast. Additionally, I am an advocate for tech diversity and I am part of the Diversity and Inclusion team within BT which involves helping to drive change around our processes and culture.
I am passionate about giving back to the tech community as throughout my journey into technology I was fortunate to be mentored by some incredible females and I now dedicate a lot of my time paying that forward. I have completed the CodeFirst Girls Fellowship and over two months I taught 40 girls coding skills in SQL and within a team completed research into leadership and education. I have taught a number of CodeFirst Girls courses and I also develop my own coding courses for Coursera aiding more people in their coding journeys and currently have taught nearly 7000 people coding skills. I am also the Founder of FirbroME a management application for those suffering with chronic illness and was inspired with my experience of living with a chronic illness.
I also lead on BT Belfast Outreach activities which included the mTech Academy project which is a programme where 15 schools across Northern Ireland are linked with employers to deliver an experiential learning project over the course of six months. As part of the programme there was a workshop with careers teaching to up-skill them around the future careers in technology and empower them with the information needed to encourage students to pursue a career in technology. The programme was praised by senior leadership across BT and has been described by students as “the most worthwhile project they have done in school.” My work within the Belfast community around inspiring others from all backgrounds into technology has been recognised in a number of ways as I was named one of the Sync NI ‘Tech Trailblazer’ as part of the STEM role models in Northern Ireland, I was also highly commended for the Diversity Advocate Award at this year’s Women Who Code She Rocks Awards and nominated for the Rising Star Awards. Finally, I am a public speaker, mentor and creator to share my story and encourage others to consider a career in technology.
Suze Shardlow | Suze Shardlow
Suze Shardlow wrote her first line of code in 1982 and started making websites in 1996.
She was a hobby coder all the way through primary school and university. The UK education system didn't know what to do with girls who were interested in tech, so she was never shown that you could program for a living. Without a post-university plan, she enrolled on the most versatile degree she could think of - BA Business - and took all the marketing modules on offer while building websites for her friends on the side.
Suze's degree and subsequent Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing kicked off a 20-year career in management, communications and strategy with organisations including the Canadian Government and the Metropolitan Police. Suze spent four years winning the hearts and minds of 30000 police officers and 20000 support staff to support them in adopting new tech. Later, Suze retrained to become an expert advisor on covert policing, managing pan-London undercover surveillance.
A move into community policing and managing buildings, vehicles and criminal exhibits around London put Suze at the sharp end of Government cuts. With the promise of redundancy in 2018, Suze took a long hard look at what she wanted to do for the next 20 years and grabbed the opportunity to retrain in modern software engineering, rapidly building a portfolio of full-stack applications. Suze has been an active volunteer since becoming a Scout leader in 2014. She began donating her time and expertise as a Chapter Lead at Ladies of Code London, and then a Director at Women Who Code London, leading a combined total of more than 10000 members.
Suze now works for herself. She creates and delivers her own coding courses, teaching Python and JavaScript as well as how to create your own personal branding website. She has worked with academics at the University of Sussex to bring their research interviews from 30 years ago to life via a chatbot. The interviews are with women about their views on love, sex and relationships at the height of the AIDS pandemic. Suze is also a technical writer and conference speaker, having given talks in the UK and overseas. She's an experienced and engaging event host who instinctively gets the best out of her guests and speakers, even when live and unedited.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Suze took all her tech meetups online, delivering more than 130 hours of live online tech content across 60+ events. These included over 90 hours of facilitated tech co-working sessions which helped more than 60 people through lockdown. She designed and delivered more than 15 hours of public speaking coaching and mentoring workshops, then organised and hosted a live online showcase event for the women who "graduated" from these workshops. Suze's work attracted the attention of Global Diversity CFP Day, who selected her as Europe Lead for their 2021 online conference. Suze curated the content and a diverse group of speakers for a six-hour live stream, then hosted and produced the entire event singlehandedly, facilitating one fireside chat and two panel discussions in the process. This success led to Suze being chosen as a panel discussion MC at codebar Festival.
Suze's tech community event ideas and methodologies, borne of two decades of knowing her various audiences and documented in her blog, have been replicated by other groups including those based in Silicon Valley, California.
Eiman Raza | EY
Eiman is a Senior Tech Consultant in EY’s FSO Capital Markets practice joining the firm as a graduate in 2018.
She is also currently the co-chair of the EY Muslim Community. In this role, Eiman leads 750+ global members in building an environment where people of all faiths and backgrounds can bring their true authentic selves to work every single day.
She has worked on several high-profile engagements with some of EY’s largest global clients, and as a result has constantly been recognised as an outstanding high-performer and a rising star in the technology space.
Passionate about diversity and inclusion, Eiman works to ensure those at EY feel like they belong – becoming one of the youngest co-chairs of a Community whilst still being a graduate and launching several new initiatives including the EYMC Women in Leadership series. Eiman is a regular public-speaker, and a mentor for several BAME/Muslim females across the UK. She speaks extensively on tech, inclusion, gender-parity, allyship and leadership.
Torgyn Erland | QuantumBlack
I am a Machine Learning consultant and Data Scientist, specialising in Algorithmic Transparency and Explainable AI.
As part of QuantumBlack, I am helping organisations worldwide to tackle some of their toughest problems with the power of data and advanced analytics. I am trusted to design, implement, and deploy innovative Machine Learning systems that support – in a safe and open way - decision makers from CEOs to nurses alike.
My background is in Computer and Information Engineering. I come from a rural school in a post-Soviet country, where in early 00s power outages were getting in the way of learning coding and sub-zero indoor temperatures caused the ink in pens to freeze. From this position, I feel very privileged to be representing in this prestigious award all those dreamers in science and technology who had to break down language, geopolitical, socio-economic, gender and other identity barriers.
I never could have imagined that my strive for academic excellence would bring me this far along my dreams. While studying towards the Bachelors’ degree, I earned the title of “IT/Computer Science Undergraduate of the Year” in a UK nationwide competition. My alma-mater is Warwick, where I have won numerous accolades for “Outstanding Academic Performance”, as well as my involvement in frontline student initiatives, such as Green Gown Award for building one of the world’s largest DIY wind turbines on a university campus, or setting up a Machine Learning bootcamp for fellow students in our Australian partner university.
It was during research for my Ph.D in Applied Machine Learning that I began to appreciate the real-world impact that advanced analytics can have. I collaborated with the local NHS trust and a medical school in Oxford, deploying Machine Learning to assist doctors with clinical decision making, harnessing biomedical data to highlight which treatments would be most effective. This grew into a variety of applications, from modelling how likely kidney transplants were to be accepted or rejected, to prediction models for a patient’s risk of developing diabetes over ten years.
In 2016 I won McKinsey’s Next Generation Women Leaders award and founded an outreach initiative that aimed to inspire and enable rural schoolchildren to learn programming. Ever since, I view myself proudly as a teacher. I teach computers and humans to learn complex patters from simple observations and data. My personal dream is to empower talented underrepresented youth from developing world to become the future IT-professionals that would shape a more open, accessible, and creative technology sector.
Nipuni Karunaratne | Rolls-Royce Plc
Nipuni is the Digital Technology Manager at Rolls Royce, an Entrepreneur and the Vice chair for the Rolls Royce Gender Diversity Network in the UK.
She comes from an engineering family background where her parents always motivated her to learn and thrive for more in life without any barriers. Little did she know that becoming a female engineer in a male dominated industry could be so challenging yet exciting.
After her early education in Sri Lanka and in Dubai, she started her MEng in Aerospace Engineering at an early age of 16 which made her the youngest in every situation that she faced. In her second year of university she was offered a role at a research centre in Cambridge as a Technical research assistant. This is where her passion for new technology and innovations fruited. After her graduation in 2014, she was offered a role at Rolls Royce Civil Aerospace as a Graduate Manufacturing Engineer. During this time, she worked in various departments within the company progressing her career and gaining a wider understanding of the business. During this time, she became a Lean Six Sigma practitioner supporting the continuous improvement culture at Rolls Royce. As an example of this, she successfully closed out a major project which saves £1.2M yearly and increasing for the company. After successfully completing her graduate scheme as an overperforming employee of the company, she was offered a technical leadership role in Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul department to lead the new global facility setup in North America and Asia. One of these factories being the world biggest repair centre for the Aerospace industry. In 2018 as a business-critical requirement, she then joined the Supply Chain Management Team supporting the service operations while looking after the German vendor network. In this role she was technically responsible for continuous supply chain of several critical parts of a Jet engine.
Nipuni’s passion in Science and Technology always motivated her to look for new technologies and improvements in industries. In 2019 whilst being at Rolls Royce, she started her own company in Research & Development with a focus in fourth generation Industry solutions. As the world moves to this digital transformation, Nipuni has recently been appointed as the Rolls Royce Digital Technology Team Manager for the Model Factory team. She will be working with a team of experts to deliver a major digitalisation program.
Through out Nipuni’s career she has been actively involved in STEM activities and helping the young generation by mentoring, coaching and inspiring. She has been a motivational and a STEM panel speaker in many leading events in the United Kingdom. During these events she have supported both young male and female participants by mentoring and coaching them from an early age to support in having a successful career in STEM industries. She has been elected in 2019 as the UK chair for the Gender Diversity Network at Rolls Royce and currently she is working as the Vice Chair supporting the company in positively changing the working environment to be more diverse and inclusive. This network has grown to be the biggest employee resource group with 1000+ members in the company. She has been involved in designing and developing a personal development session within the company which has become very popular and helped many female engineers to do well in their day to day job.
Nipuni’s ambition has always been to spread awareness and change the communities and STEM industries to move away from the stereotypes to values the talent and be more inclusive. She always thrives to be a role model for career driven women, demonstrating through her own experience of being a female young engineer in the world.
Alexandra Mather | WSP
Alexandra is a Graduate Civil Engineer working for WSP. Starting her career in the highways discipline for 18 months, Alexandra worked on a variety of projects in this time; ranging from design work, safety schemes and 2 internal secondments, before transferring into the bridges discipline.
Whilst in the Bridges team, Alexandra has completed varied inspection work and is currently assisting with the management of the delivery of a set of footbridge inspections and assessments; liaising with client and contractor representatives to deliver the scheme successfully. She has collaborated with environmental teams to deliver specimen drawings and completed minor structure costings for the A9 Dualling Scheme; one of Scotland’s largest infrastructure projects. She has also had involvement in successful bid winning for WSP; contributing to the team leading the successful win of the Highways England contract which aims to serve as a platform for strategic partnership with her company.
A keen advocate of the “pay it forward” culture, Alexandra volunteers as an e-Mentor for the University of Leeds and produces official video content for the scheme to encourage others to get involved. In 2020 she was selected to sit on the National Womens Engineering Society Early Careers Board. As a part of the committee she organises and promotes events aiming to improve diversity and inclusion in Engineering. Alexandra has successfully blogged about the societies efforts, with her blog about the events for ‘International Women in Engineering Day’ being published on the WES website and in the WES quarterly journal, ‘The Woman Engineer’.
Alexandra is keen to act as a role model for women in her industry – her work on the Womens Engineering Society Early Careers Board and the National Association for Women in Construction North East committee has provided her with the opportunity to promote her passions of both gender diversity in Engineering and the range of careers available.
Sylvia Lu | u-blox AG
Sylvia is a multi-award-winning engineer and inventor, a non-executive director, advisor and ambassador.
Sylvia has over a decade of experience in the Telecoms industry for four mobile generations (2G, 3G, 4G and 5G) and was recently recognized as one of the UK's Top 50 Women in Engineering. She has been critically instrumental in the evolution of global technology standards for the Cellular Internet of Things to enable economics of scale – a technology that has now been deployed globally over billions.
Sylvia heads cellular technology strategy at u-blox, provides guidance on the impact of 5G technologies on products and strategy, as well as major inter-sector, multi-country international projects. She also provides industry-focused, independent advice to the UK government and policy panels on future plans for 5G development.
Sylvia serves on several national and global industry Boards: she is an elected board member of CW (Cambridge Wireless) Ltd since 2017, and serves on the advisory board of UK5G, which provides independent advice to the UK government and national 5G networks on future plans for 5G deployment. She was recently elected to the Board of 5G-ACIA (5G Alliance for Connected Industries and Automation) in June 2020, joined forces with global industry stakeholders to influence 5G development and deployment in line with industrial imperatives.
Sylvia operates on an international stage as a keynote speaker on 5G, emerging technologies, and global standards for a wide range of stakeholders (highlights incl. House of Lords, Westminster eForum, Financial Times Live, United Nation's International Telecommunication Union, Mobile World Congress, Ofcom, IET, IEEE), and contributes to industry magazines and journals, some of which have been translated into 6 languages with a global reach.
Sylvia was handpicked as an Ambassador for the prestigious Women of the Future programme. She inspires and empowers female engineers and future leaders as a role model and through appearances and talks at schools and universities. She won several special recognitions for her work on empowering future female trailblazers.
Sylvia holds a first degree in Electronic Engineering from Birmingham University and an MSc. in Communications and Signal Processing from the University of Bristol in the UK. She recently received a Financial Times Non-Executive Director Diploma, a Pearson SRF BTEC Level 7 Advanced Professional Diploma that equips her to be a more effective NED.
Chidinma Okolo | Diamond Light Source, UK
Chidinma graduated with a First class Honours (cGPA of 4.75/5.0) from Zoology Department, University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 2011.
She was the best graduating student in the Department of Zoology and Faculty of Biological Sciences, as well as the 3rd best overall in the University. She joined the same University as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in 2013, where she completed her Master’s degree in Zoology & Environmental Biology (Physiology as Specialisation) in February 2015 with a CGPA of 5.0/5.0.
Armed with a full Doctoral Scholarship (~NZ$ 130,000 over 3 years) covering tuition and upkeep from University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand in April 2015, she left for New Zealand in September 2015 for her PhD studies in Physiology and graduated in absentia while in the UK in December 2019.
Currently, she works as a Senior Support Scientist for Diamond Light Source Ltd, UK's National Synchrotron facility, where she does mind-blowing research with an amazing world-class team. Her research interests revolve around Physiology, Innate Immunity, Vaccine Development and Biophysical Characterisation, Antibody Characterisation, BioNanoparticles and Nanoparticles Characterisation, Pathogen Internalization and Clearance Mechanisms, Methods Development and Super-resolution Microscopy. She is part of a team in Diamond that uses soft X-ray microscopy (tomography) and fluorescence microscopy to correlatively study Biological matter in their near-native state.
Kajal Chhapia | Oliver Wyman
Kajal Chhapia is a public policy professional with experience across financial services. Kajal recently joined Oliver Wyman, prior to which she was at the Bank of England.
Kajal joined the Bank of England in 2018 after graduating from the University of Oxford. Her main role focused on ending ‘too big to fail’ through capital and liquidity policy for global banks. During the pandemic, Kajal also spent 6 months at the Joint Biosecurity Centre (Department for Health and Social Care) determining the UK’s international travel policy. Kajal joined Oliver Wyman in 2021, working primarily across Public Sector Policy and Financial Services. Passionate about inclusion, diversity and social mobility, Kajal is also the founder and director of Divercity, a non-profit organisation championing diversity in Finance and Consulting. Kajal leads a mentoring programme with 100+ participants across 54 companies, 38 universities and 3 countries. Additionally, Kajal is particularly interested in sustainable finance and international development and holds the CFA Investment Management Certificate
Jolee Tung | Oliver Wyman
Jolee is a Senior Consultant in Oliver Wyman's London office where she supports private and public sector clients across EMEA with commercial strategy, customer proposition, organisational effectiveness and target operating model design.
To date, she has worked across a broad range of industries, including Financial Services, Media, as well as Healthcare.
Outside of her core role, Jolee is an active leader within her community. She co-leads EMPOWERED UK, the UK chapter of Oliver Wyman's employee resource group for racial, ethnic and cultural diversity, and is also a core contributor to the firm's entry-level recruitment initiatives. Moreover, Jolee serves as a Board member for the Mulgrave School Alumni Association, where she advises on the strategic direction of her high school's alumni program.
Jolee graduated from University College London with a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences degree, at the top of her year. She is originally from Vancouver, Canada.