Wendy Hall

Dame Wendy Hall, born in West London, England in 1952.

Dame Wendy Hall joined the University of Southampton's newly formed Computer Science group in 1984, where she was one of the first computer scientists to undertake research into multimedia and hypermedia. Her team went on to create the award-winning Microcosm hypermedia system which pre-dated the World Wide Web.

Dame Wendy was appointed the University’s first female professor of engineering in 1994 and her work has helped pave the way for digital libraries, the Semantic Web, and has continued to develop the discipline of Web Science. In 2006, she, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Nigel Shadbolt, and Daniel J. Weitzner founded the Web Science Research Initiative, a collaboration between MIT and the University of Southampton to bridge and formalise the social and technical aspects of the world wide web.

Wendy has earned many honours and awards throughout her career. She was awarded an OBE in the 2000 Birthday Honours and in 2008 she became president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 2009 she was awarded her DBE. That same year she was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Her nomination states that she is distinguished for her contribution to understanding the interactions of humans with large scale multimedia information systems and that her research is aimed at both understanding the evolution of the web and engineering its future.

Dame Wendy Hall was one of the women profiled in our Women in Computing Festival 2017 of entitled Where Did All the Women Go?. Click here for the Women in Computing timeline created for that event.