Ada Lovelace Day 2026

This year, Warwick's Ada Lovelace Day celebration will take place on Wednesday 21 October 2026 (week 3 of term 1) in MS.01 (Zeeman building). Our speakers are Karen Habermann, Charlotte Roman, Vandita Patel (see further below for more information about the speakers). Everybody (including students, staff, the public) is welcome to attend!

The schedule is as follows:

2 pm	Charlotte Roman
2.30 pm	Vandita Patel
3 pm	Coffee & tea break
3.30 pm	Karen Habermann
4 pm	Panel discussion and socializing

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 relevant Warwick student societies hold their own Ada Lovelace Day celebration to showcase the lives and work of female 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:

Karen Habermann is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick and conducts research in stochastic analysis with connections to geometry, analysis, and data science. After studying and completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in Bonn and at Sorbonne University in Paris, before moving to the University of Warwick.

Charlotte Roman (University of Warwick 2013-21 BSc/MSc/PhD Mathematics) I’m a senior machine learning engineer working at Cleo, a fintech producing a financial advisor app. I work in the marketing team using ML for real-time bidding optimisation and forecasting. I completed a PhD in how people’s decisions on route choice in a transportation network are impacted by various technologies such as the presence of reinforcement learning traffic lights or autonomous vehicles.

Vandita Patel is a Lecturer in Pure Mathematics at The University of Manchester. Prior to this, she was a Neumann Research Fellow at The University of Manchester and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto. She obtained her PhD in 2017 from the University of Warwick. Her research is in Number Theory, where she uses a mixture of classical and modern techniques to find integer solutions to certain algebraic equations.