Women in Computing

Prof. Miriam Butt received her PhD in 1994 from Stanford University. After working at the Universities of Tuebingen, Stuttgart, Konstanz and at UMIST, Manchester as a researcher and lecturer, in 2003 she took up a professorship for general and computational linguistics at the University of Konstanz. She is interested in theories and architectures of grammars and has worked mostly on morphosyntactic phenomena from South Asian languages and how they interface with semantics, discourse interpretation and prosody. She translates her linguistic knowledge into helping to build computational applications, with a particular focus on building resources for the under-resourced languages of South Asia. Butt has written and co-authored several books, among them a Cambridge Textbook on case (Theories of Case) and a handbook on grammar engineering (The Grammar Writer's Cookbook). Over the last decade, she has engaged in multidisciplinary cooperations with Computer Science and Political Science and has been working on Visual Analytics for linguistic structure (LingVis) on two major areas: 1) historical language change; 2) the linguistic cues and framing strategies used in political discourse.

--coming soon--

Enxhi is a Digital Innovation Lead in Global Manufacturing & Supply Chain in Takeda Pharmaceuticals. She is a Computer Scientist by background and has 4 years of experience in industry. Her professional focus lies on how innovation and digital technologies can automate, optimize processes and drive business transformation. For the past 2.5 years in Takeda her main focus has been implementing Augmented & Virtual Reality, Advanced analytics, and paperless solutions across Takeda’s manufacturing network.

Andrea Šipka is a scientific manager for Data Science and its Applications at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). As a manager of a new research department, Andrea's to-do list is both long and varied - acquiring funding, establishing industrial partnerships, recruitment and HR, managing the delivery of projects in industry, academia, and the charity sector, and managing initiatives such as the Data Science for Social Good summer fellowship, and doing research (when time permits). Prior to joining DFKI, she was a doctoral researcher in Social Computing at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She worked on the Data Science for Social Good initiative at the Alan Turing Institute and the University of Warwick (UK) and spent four years at IBM as a software engineer and release lead. She holds an MSc in Data Science from the University of Padua, Italy, and a BSc in Mathematics with Computer Science from the University of Southampton, UK.

Andrea Volkamer recently started her group as full professor at Saarland University in 'Data Driven Drug Design' (2022). Before she was an assistant professor in 'Structural Bioinformatics and in silico Toxicology' at the Institute of Physiology, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin. After earning her PhD from the University of Hamburg (2013), with focus on computational active site and druggability predictions, Andrea Volkamer worked at BioMedX Innovation Center, Heidelberg, as a PostDoc researcher on tools to assist the development of selective kinase inhibitors in collaboration with Merck KGaA (2013-2016). Her main research focus is method development and application at the interface of structural bioinformatics and cheminformatics, with particular interest in structure-enabled machine learning approaches, applied in the context of computational drug design and in silico toxicology. Group Website: https://volkamerlab.org/

Sarah Theres Völkel is a Senior User Experience Researcher at Google in Munich, Germany. In that role, she investigates how to keep children safe online. Prior to joining Google, Sarah did her PhD in Human-Computer Interaction at LMU Munich, supervised by Prof. Heinrich Hussmann and Prof. Albrecht Schmidt. Her PhD focused on imbuing conversational agents, such as voice assistants and chatbots, with personalities and tailoring these personalities to individual user preferences. During her PhD, she did an internship at Google and was funded by Audi for three years. During the latter, she worked on an interdisciplinary smartphone sensing project. She holds a M.Sc. in Technical Communication, a B.Sc. in Technical Communication, and a B.Sc. in Computer Science, all from RWTH Aachen University.