Women hold research and teaching posts at various levels across the Department, and we have eight female professors. Our female researchers conduct world-leading research and our lecturers are part of a team offering world-class teaching. Their excellence is recognised by others too. Professor Marta Kwiatkowska, for instance, was the first women to win the Milner Award, while Professor Sadie Creese is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Council on Cyber Security. Read about the activities of some of our department’s female academics and researchers below.

Dr. Anisoara Calinescu

Anisoara Calinescu is a Senior Lecturer; she joined the Department in 2002. She has a DPhil in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford, and a five-year MSc degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Iasi, Romania. Within the department, she has a wide range of teaching responsibilities, including undergraduate and graduate teaching, project supervision, graduate training, and she also helps with admissions interviews and open days. Her research interests are multi- and inter-disciplinary, and include modelling and reasoning about complex systems, such as financial markets and supply chains; complexity metrics; and agent-based networks. She currently co-supervises two DPhil students. She has been the Director of Teaching during 2016-2017, and is also a departmental harassment advisor and mental health champion.

Professor Sadie Creese

Sadie Creese is a Professor of Cyber Security and a Fellow of Worcester College. She teaches threat detection, risk assessment and operational aspects of security. Her current research portfolio includes threat modelling and detection, visual analytics for cybersecurity, risk propagation logics and communication, resilience strategies, privacy, vulnerability of distributed ledgers, and understanding cyber-harm. She is Principal Investigator on the AXIS Insurance Company sponsored project 'Analysing Cyber Value-at-Risk' focused on developing a method for predicting potential harms arising from cyber-attacks. She is a co-Investigator on the PETRAS EPSRC sponsored Internet of Things Research Hub project 'Cyber Risk Assessment for Coupled Systems' which is developing a new risk assessment method aimed at helping organisations prepare for the threats and vulnerabilities we will face as the Internet of Things evolves. She was the founding Director of the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre (GCSCC) at the Oxford Martin School where she continues to serve as a Director conducting research into what constitutes national cybersecurity capacity, working with countries and international organisations around the world. She was the founding Director of Oxford’s Cybersecurity network launched in 2008 and now called CyberSecurity@Oxford, and is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Council on Cyber Security.

Professor Edith Elkind

Edith Elkind is a Professor of Computer Science. She obtained her PhD from Princeton University (USA) in 2005. Before joining Oxford, she was a researcher at University of Warwick, University of Liverpool and Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), and a faculty member at University of Southampton and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). Her research is supported by a European Research Council starting grant, ACCORD (Algorithms for Complex Collective decisiOns on stRuctured Domains). Her research interests include algorithmic game theory and computational social choice, with a particular focus on efficient algorithms for making collective decisions. In 2018, she serves as a chair of the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (ACM EC) and International Workshop on Computational Social Choice (COMSOC).

Professor Leslie Ann Goldberg

Leslie Ann Goldberg is a Professor of Computer Science and a Fellow of St Edmund Hall. Her main research interest is computational complexity, where the aim is to discover which computational problems are feasible, which are inherently infeasible, and what problem features cause feasibility.

Professor Marina Jirotka

Marina Jirotka is Professor of Human Centred Computing in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. Her expertise involves co-producing user and community requirements and human computer interaction, particularly for collaborative systems (CSCW). She has been at the forefront of recent work in Responsible Innovation in the UK and the European Union. She leads an interdisciplinary research group investigating the responsible development of technologies that are more responsive to societal acceptability and desirability. Her current projects involve a range of topics in Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI): she leads the Responsible Innovation initiative for Quantum Technologies; Co-PI on EPSRC Digital Economy TIPS project, Emancipating Users Against Algorithmic Biases for a Trusted Digital Economy (UnBias); and co-directing the development of an Observatory for Responsible Research and Innovation in ICT (ORBIT) that will provide RRI services to ICT researchers. Marina is a Chartered IT Professional of the British Computer Society and sits on the ICT Ethics Specialist Group committee. She has published widely in international journals and conferences on e-Research, Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Requirements Engineering.

Professor Marta Kwiatkowska

Marta Kwiatkowska is Professor of Computing Systems and Fellow of Trinity College. She is the Head of the Automated Verification Theme and Deputy Head of Department for Research at Oxford's Department of Computer Science. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 2014 and the Royal Society Milner Medal in 2018. She is a Fellow of ACM and Member of Academia Europea. She chaired the ERC Starting Grants Panel, was a member of the REF 2014 subpanel, and will co-chair the Federated Logic Conference (FLOC 2018) in Oxford in July 2018. Marta has made fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of model checking for probabilistic systems, focusing on automated techniques for verification and synthesis from quantitative specifications. She led the development of the leading software tool, PRISM model checker, winner of the HVC Award 2016. She has given numerous keynote lectures and tutorials, including a talk that was videoed at the Hay Festival: 'When to trust a robot...'. She recently completed the ERC Advanced Grant VERIWARE 'From software verification to "everyware" verification' and is now supported by the EPSRC Programme Grant on Mobile Autonomy and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie AFFECTech network on Personal Technologies for Affective Health. Prior to Oxford, she was Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, Lecturer at the University of Leicester and Assistant Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland.

Professor Blanca Rodriguez

Blanca Rodriguez is Professor of Computational Medicine, Head of the Computational Biology and Health Informatics theme and Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at Oxford. Her research interest is in investigating the causes and modulators of variability in the response of the human heart to disease and therapies. Her team embeds computational methods in cardiovascular research to augment experimental and clinical investigations (www.cs.ox.ac.uk/ccs). Their research is supported by an established network of collaborators in academia and industry, who are world-leading experts in human cardiovascular medicine and pharmacology. Their research benefits from financial support from Wellcome, NC3Rs, EPSRC, Royal Society, European Commission and British Heart Foundation, and previously MRC. Blanca is originally from Valencia, Spain, where she studied engineering at the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, and conducted her PhD in cardiac modelling. After graduating, she trained as a postdoctoral scientist in New Orleans, USA. She then joined Oxford in 2004, first as a postdoc and then as MRC Career Development Fellow, before taking up her current position in 2013. In addition to a fulfilling academic life, she has a husband and three children, who keep her busy and very happy, and a large extended family in Spain (14 nieces and nephews and counting ...).

Professor Niki Trigoni

Niki Trigoni is a Professor in the Department and a Fellow of Kellogg College. She is currently Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training on Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems, a program that combines machine learning, robotics, sensor systems and verification/control. She also leads the Cyber Physical Systems Group, which is focusing on intelligent and autonomous sensor systems with applications in positioning, healthcare, environmental monitoring and smart cities. The group's research ranges from novel sensor modalities and low level signal processing to high level inference and learning. She obtained her DPhil at the University of Cambridge, and then went on to become a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, and a Lecturer at Birkbeck College.

Dr Jun Zhao

Jun Zhao is a Senior Researcher in the department. Her research focuses on enabling better control of personal information on connected devices, such as smartphone devices or Internet of Things devices. For this, she takes a human-centric approach, focusing on understanding real users' needs, in order to design technologies that can make a real impact. More particularly, she is actively working on raising children's and parents' awareness of privacy risks related to the use of tablet computers or connected toys. For this, she works closely with schools, families and organisations that have young children's best interests in mind. She moved back to the University of Oxford in 2015, after a short career break. She is truly passionate about academic research and what it can do to make a difference to our lives.