Ada Lovelace Day 2010: Julie!

Today’s Ada Lovelace Day, a day when people across the world will be writing blog posts about women in technology that they admire. It also represents a year of this blog, as I started on Ada Lovelace Day last year with a post about Sue Black.

My choice for today’s celebration of women-in-tech is my friend Julie Greensmith. She’s a lecturer in computing at Nottingham, doing research into artificial immune systems and into the nature of thrill. This second research direction has her covering people in electrodes, pointing cameras at them, and sticking them on roller coasters. All in the name of science. When I last spoke with her she was talking about buying a bucking bronco for the lab. YAY SCIENCE!

I invited Julie up to give a talk at the 2009 BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium (that’s where the picture comes from), and she’s spoken at the Royal Institution for womenintechnology.co.uk, and I’ve heard nothing but praise for both talks. She’s a great person to invite if you want an inspiring woman speaker, and if you’re lucky, she’ll show some video of a journalist screaming on a rollercoaster.

She also juggles, snowboards, plays about three hundred different musical instruments, and is great company. And she’s been called “Dr Thrill” in the national press, which you have to agree is very cool indeed. So here’s to Jools and many years of inspiring women scientists to come.