Ada Lovelace Day 2023
About this year's event
This year, Warwick's Ada Lovelace Day celebration took place on Wednesday 18 October 2023 (Week 3 of Term 1), and featured talks from Sophie Battrick, Pricing Manager at Aviva, Zhana Kuncheva, Director of Health Data Science at Optima Partners, Charlotte Roman, Machine Learning Engineer at Deliveroo and Jo Evans, WZL Assistant Professor at Warwick Mathematics Institute.
If you came along, we hope you enjoyed the event! If you missed it, watch this space for details of a similar event next year.
What is Ada Lovelace Day?
Ada Lovelace Day is an annual celebration of women's achievements in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM). Each year, the Warwick Maths Society holds its own Ada Lovelace Day celebration to showcase the lives and work of female mathematical scientists.
The event is open to all, irrespective of gender, so please do come along!
Who was Ada Lovelace?
Ada Lovelace (1815 – 1852) is regarded by many as the first computer programmer.
Through her tutor Mary Somerville, she met and became friends with Charles Babbage, who was working on the Analytical Engine, the first computer.
She was commissioned to produce a translation of a lecture he gave from Italian, and augmented this translation significantly with her own notes; these contained the first algorithm for implementation on a computer ever published.
More about this year's speakers:
Sophie Battrick says: "As an ex-Warwick student I am delighted to have been invited to speak at Ada Lovelace Day this year, particularly since I once organised the day myself when I held the role of Equal Opportunities Officer within WMS! It is an event I am very passionate about, as I think it is important to celebrate and promote women in Mathematical Sciences.
After graduating from Warwick with a Maths and Physics degree in 2020, I joined Aviva as a Chartered Accountancy Graduate. This enabled me to rotate between three different roles within Finance whilst completing the ACA qualification, which was a lot to balance! During this time, I also established a ‘Women in Finance’ network across Aviva, which grew to over 250 members within a year and is still expanding today. Since qualifying, I have now moved to a different area of the business and am currently working as a Motor Pricing Manager, whilst also leading the Cultural Change Group in my current department. I am excited to share more about my career and my story in order to give an insight into the various opportunities that I was presented with after graduating, and how I made the most of them."
Zhana Kuncheva is currently working as Director of Health Data Sciences at Optima Partners where she leads a team of PhD scientists closely collaborating with academic experts at leading institutions (ICL, UoE) to deliver leading-edge solutions to pharma and biotech clients.
Dr Kuncheva has six years of industrial drug discovery experience (C4X Discovery, Silence Therapeutics) with a focus on translational genomics for target identification & validation, and population stratification. Before this, Dr Kuncheva completed her PhD in Mathematics at ICL with a focus on modelling complex genomic and neuroscience networks. She also has experience with neuroimaging data as she spent her MSc year at Warwick researching the topic.
Charlotte Roman is a Machine Learning Engineer at Deliveroo working in their advertising org. Her team is responsible for in-app commercial content for restaurants by improving the relevancy of ads whilst optimising ad revenue. She graduated from the University of Warwick with a PhD in Mathematics for Real-world Systems, and her thesis focused on using game theory and reinforcement learning to improve congestion on traffic networks.
Jo Evans is a WZL Assistant Professor working at the Warwick Mathematics Institute, where her research centres on the analysis of partial differential equations derived from kinetic theory. She studied for her PhD at the University of Cambridge, and subsequently held a post-doctoral fellowship funded by the Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris at Paris Dauphine. In 2020, she moved to Warwick to begin her current position, where her research is funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Alongside her teaching and research activities, Jo is vice-chair of the departmental Early Career Committee, and is an advisory board member for the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences.