Mary Sheeran
Professor at Chalmers University of Technology
Mary Sheeran has been a functional programming enthusiast for nearly 40 years, at Oxford University, Glasgow University and now Chalmers University of Technology, where she has been a full professor since 1999. She was designing and using a functional hardware description language before there were hardware description languages, and she contributed to the development of SAT-based methods for verifying hardware. She has been a supervisor to a great bunch of doctoral students too.
This has all entailed working mostly with men. A couple of years ago, her university asked its staff "how would you like to change Chalmers?" and the answer was obvious to her: increase gender equality, aiming for excellence. The resulting proposal was funded to the tune of about 30 million euros and work on the Genie initiative began last January, with Mary as co-leader.
Past Activities
Code Mesh LDN
16.25 - 17.10
Let's get more women into computer science
It is well known that science and engineering disciplines fail to attract and retain women, in academia and in industry. And horrifyingly, computer science is at the bottom of the class. In this talk, Mary will consider the current sorry state of computer science in academia, why we have ended up here, and what we can do.
THIS TALK IN THREE WORDS
Call
to
Action
OBJECTIVES
The talk aims to convince the audience that we have a problem with gender balance in computer science, that we all need to care, and that it is time for action.
TARGET AUDIENCE
Everyone