EECS Women Higher Education Network (WHEN)

Mission 

EECS Women in Higher Education Network (WHEN) can play a crucial role in establishing a strong community for individuals identifying as women and provide opportunities for exchange among academics at all levels – from PhD students to research assistants, postdoctoral fellows, to academics. The network will contribute to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion. Balanced gender representation improves working culture, supports a broader range of viewpoints and, therefore, leads to more creative ideas and innovation. This is particularly relevant for the fields traditionally underrepresented by women, such as computer science and engineering. 

Our goal is to create an environment for open communication and collaboration, enabling our community to address current challenges and potentially influence policies and practices within EECS and the Science and Engineering Faculty. The network will also allow for more visible role models and mentors, particularly benefiting early-career academics. 

 
Vision 

We are convinced that the most open discussions and natural professional collaborations occur with the bottom-up approach. Therefore, first, we plan to organise an initial participatory workshop to define the objectives and activities of the EECS WHEN. We will analyse the needs/expectations of academics regarding the EECS WHEN using professional moderation. This user-centred approach will address real challenges in the women’s research community. Within this event, we also plan to extend our core organising team by encouraging additional members to join. We will enable online access for all events for women who cannot participate in person but still need to benefit from the networking. 

Second, we plan a series of networking events featuring speakers renowned in the field of Computer Science and Engineering. The talks will be followed by networking events, which provide an opportunity ffor informal discussions.  

We are building this initiative with the support of the ERIC Fund as a pilot project, which can potentially develop further. In the future, EECS WHEN plans to expand its functions to include additional support for early-career academics and women mentorship programs for students. 

Events 

The network will provide a series of workshops, seminars, and social events to enhance diversity and support women colleagues in EECS.

The first WHEN event

Team 

Dr. Katja Ivanova  Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, with the main research interest in multimodal human-robot interaction and haptic communication between agents as part of user-centred robotics for medical applications. Research Groups: Cognitive Science, ARQ, C4DM
Dr. Anna Xambo Sedo Senior Lecturer in Sound and Music Computing at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, looking at designing and evaluating interactive music systems that support collaboration, participation, non-hierarchical structures and do-it-yourself (DIY) practices.  Research Groups: C4DM
Dr. Mona Jaber Senior Lecturer in IoT with the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include zero-touch networks, the intersection of ML and IoT in the context of sustainable development goals, and IoT-driven digital twins. In this regard, she has published in the areas of sustainable energy, smart mobility, and privacy-preserving e-health. As part of her industry research collaboration efforts, Mona has established a ground-breaking project that uses optical fibre systems for the detection and classification of active travel – a robust, scalable, and privacy-preserving method that informs smart city and transportation planning. She is the director of the ‘Digital Twins for Sustainable Development Goals’ research lab at QMUL, where she attracted the first multidisciplinary core team to further the studies in this area. Mona was awarded the title of N2Women Rising Star in Computer Networking and Communications in 2022. She is also a steering committee member of the IEEE Women in Engineering of the UK and Ireland affinity group.
Dr. Aisha Abuelmaatti Lecturer at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, and the Programme Director for BSc (Hons) Computer Science with Management (ITMB), and the Deputy Programme Director for L7 Degree Apprenticeship. She is also a member of the Sustainability Committee and the Employability and Placements Committee.
Prof. Maria Liakata Professor in Natural Language Processing at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, and in receipt of an EPSRC/UKRI Turing AI fellowship award on Creating Time Sensitive Sensors from Language & Heterogeneous User-Generated Content.
Dr. Michaela Macdonald  Lecturer in Management at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, specialising in Cybersecurity Law, IoT Product Development and Management and Product Development and Marketing.
Dr. Julia Ive Lecturer in Natural Language Processing at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London.
Dr. Laurissa Tokarchuk Senior Lecturer at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London with research interest in Mobile and Location-Based Gaming, Data driven methods for HCI, Mobile Sensing, Social Computing, Social Sensing, Recommendation and Game AI. Research groups: Game AI, Cognitive Science and The Centre for Intelligent Sensing (CIS).
Elona Shatri Research interest in Optical Music Recognition using Deep Learning and teaching expertise in machine learning and machine learning for visual data analysis. Research groups: C4DM
Mojan Omidvar PhD in Self-driving laboratory automation
María José Barrera-Chávez

Contact 

Katja Ivanova e.ivanova@qmul.ac.uk 

Anna Xambo Sedo a.xambosedo@qmul.ac.uk  

How to get involved 

• We are looking for members who would like to participate in the organisation, please, drop me an email if you are interested (e.ivanova@qmul.ac.uk).   
• Please, join our mailing list at eecs-fan@qmul.ac.uk.  
• You are also welcome to join our Teams "EECS Women in Higher Education Network". 

The logo

The logo reflects the values of diversity, equality, and community. The logo uses the font Compagnon by Juliette Duhé, Léa Pradine, Valentin Papon, Chloé Lozano, Sébastien Riollier (Velvetyne Type Foundry), which is a monospaced font listed on the Libre Fonts by Womxn directory. The logo has been featured on the Velvetyne - in use webpage.