DoC Teaching Fellow, Dr Catarina Fernandes, Academic Leader for ABI.London worked with the London tech community to organise the event.

On the 22^nd June 2016, the Anita Borg Institute Local London (ABI.London) hosted the first one day Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC/1) outside of the USA! The GHC/1 is a one-day conference modelled after the international Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), presented by the Anita Borg Institute (ABI).

DoC’s Teaching Fellow, Dr Catarina Fernandes, has been the Academic Leader for ABI.London since October 2015 and worked with the London tech community to organise the event.

The venue was the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster and was sold out, with more than 300 attendees from industry, academia, and a cohort of students.

The keynote speakers, Sarah Wilkinson (CTO Home Office) and Katharine Zaleski (CEO and Co-Founder of PowerToFly), opened and closed the event. Sarah Wilkinson is part of the DoC Industrial Liaison Board (ILB).

They were joined by 26 guest speakers in 3 parallel tracks: technical, entrepreneurial and leadership. Amongst them was Alice Bentic MBA, Co-founder of Entrepreneur First and also a member of the DoC ILB. Other sessions included academic, entrepreneurial and industry panels, a CodeCon session run by Bloomberg, and a career fair where delegates could engage with the sponsors of the event.

The department offered tickets to eight of our female students and Vanya Valindria, a DoC PhD student received a very competitive scholarship to attend the event. Read about her experience.

More details about the event, list of speakers and sponsors