Professor Wendy W Hall

Born in west London, she studied for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in mathematics at the University of Southampton. She returned in 1984 to join the newly formed Computer Science group there, working in multimedia and hypermedia. Her team invented the Microcosm hypermedia system (before the World Wide Web existed), which was commercialized a start-up company, Multicosm Ltd. She was appointed the University's first female Professor of Engineering in 1994. She then served as Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science from 2002-07. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2000 Birthday Honours, and became a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) the same year. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2009 New Year Honours. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) (also serving as President) and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET). In 2002, she was appointed a Fellow of the City and Guilds (FCGI). She also has honorary degrees from Oxford Brookes University, Glamorgan University, Cardiff University, and the University of Pretoria. On May 15, 2009, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). In 2010 she was named a Fellow of the ACM "for contributions to the semantic web and web science and for service to ACM and the international computing community." She is a member of the Advisory Council for the Campaign for Science and Engineering. She became founding Director, with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel Weitzner, of the Web Science Research Initiative in 2006, to promote the discipline of Web Science and foster research collaboration between the University of Southampton and MIT. In 2008 she was elected as the President of the Association for Computing Machinery, a professional society for computing.