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.