Isabel Scavetta | Rolls-Royce Plc
Isabel is determined to prove that women from non-tech backgrounds can break into industry, and is recognised for her extensive social action work for gender diversity and digital education.
She has had several notable volunteering achievements, including a Fellowship at Code First Girls, where she is teaching 20+ women to code, an advisory role for Microsoft’s TechHer Student community for 500+ women, and being featured on BBC News for her work as a Technology Partnerships Specialist at social enterprise ClassOf2020.
She has led teams of promising female students and professionals on hackathons aimed at social good, with her team being finalists for the Vodafone Diversity Hackathon with their project promoting diversity in the workplace. She has previous experience at various strategy and finance firms, led social action projects for 150+ youth in her local community, and holds a First Class degree in Spanish & Politics from UCL. She writes about her challenges and reflections on her blog Her Business Now to offer open access to her journey and inspire others.
Hosanna Hali | The Tech Cornr
Hosanna graduated from Cardiff University with an undergraduate degree in Business Management in 2016 and a Master's Degree is Computing and IT Management in 2018.
Hosanna started her career at Microsoft in September 2018 as a Technology Strategist in the Public Safety and National Security industry. Her role as a Technology Strategist was to be the digital CTO and trusted advisor for her customers by supporting them with the planning and execution of their digital strategy, she led the implementation of Microsoft technologies across 16 enterprise customers by orchestrating technical virtual teams across each product area of Microsoft to drive consumption of products and revenue.
In December 2020, Hosanna was offered and accepted to role of Azure Specialist in the Education space. She is now the product lead for Azure services across education customers and she supports them with their journey to the cloud and their adoption of Azure services.
Hosanna has participated in many activities to champion diversity and inclusion and empowers young women to believe that they can also begin a career technology. Hosanna has keynoted at events run by organisations like Coders of Colour and Color in Tech to speak about her experience and share knowledge with young people from her community.
Hosanna has also recently started her own platform called The Tech Cornr which she uses to give advice to women about how to start a career in Tech.
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.
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.
Arka Raina | IBM
Arka is a Consultant at IBM. She specialises in designing and delivering inclusive products/services via Agile and human-centred design methodologies, and leads teams to deliver this digital transformation.
Passionate about Tech for Good, outside of her day job she is a Design & Delivery Lead for the IBM Call For Code Racial Justice Challenge, leading a global team to design a solution starter that addresses systemic racism for diverse representation, to be deployed externally. She is also a core team member of IBM’s BAME employee network, delivering various initiatives for increased diversity, equity and inclusion at IBM, its clients and wider society. In particular, she has facilitated client roundtables to discuss DE&I strategy, organised a social media campaign to show Black STEM role models for Black History month, and has organised a mentoring scheme to match BAME early professionals with senior mentors.
Outside of work, Arka likes to participate in hackathons to design solutions for social good. She was a Design Lead for the Code First Girls 'Hack from Home' challenge last year where she and her team designed and built a fake news checking website. This year, she participated in the joint Code First Girls and Financial Conduct Authority Economic Empowerment Techsprint to design a solution to tackle financial abuse which disproportionately affects women. Arka has volunteered as a web development instructor for Code First: Girls to upskill 25 female university students and increase gender parity in the technology industry. She also writes articles and blogs at LMFNetwork, a non-profit that upskills 35,000+ womxn and underrepresented groups into tech, business and entrepreneurship. She is a design mentor at ADPList.org, where she mentors 20 junior professionals/career changers who have been affected by the pandemic to further their design careers. In particular, she reviews portfolios and CVs, advises on best practice design principles and advocates for building inclusive and culturally-sensitive products/services.
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.
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.
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.
Portia Bowman | D-Orbit
I am a space engineer by training, I have a degree in Physics and a Masters in Space Exploration Systems.
I have been working as a system engineer in the space sector since graduating in 2014, on Science and Exploration programmes with the European Space Agency, from the Cygnus Pressurised Cargo Module that sends supplies to the International Space Station, to Exomars - the rover mission heading to drill into the surface of Mars to look for signs of life, and EarthCARE, a climate monitoring satellite. I am currently UK Innovation Manager at D-Orbit, working on new product and service ideas that will help to create a sustainable space economy and feed into the development of the rapidly expanding UK Space Sector.
Since starting at D-Orbit in 2020 I have played a key role in the development of the new UK organisation, growing the team from 4 to 10 people. I manage new ideas and concepts for space based products and services from idea through to implementation. I am the lead engineer on 3 programs, I manage the engineering efforts across the team and ensure the designs meet the customer requirements.
After graduating in 2014 and struggling to find a job in the space sector, I co-founded the website SpaceCareers.uk, which provides space specific careers advice and a jobs board aimed at students and recent graduates. The website has been accessed over a million times and my work on this was recognised with a point of light award from the UK Prime Minister.
SpaceCareers.uk is a project of UKSEDS, the UK's Student Space Society, of which I am on the board of trustees and have been involved since 2013. UKSEDS provides a link between students and the space sector in order to support the next generation of talent, and is leading the way in diversity and inclusion initiatives in the space sector.