Wendy Hall PhD Pure Mathematics1977

Hi, I'm Wendy Hall and I studied PhD Pure Mathematics within Mathematical Sciences at the University of Southampton.

I chose to stay on and do a PhD, as I loved the University and Southampton and I thought another 3 years here would be great. I adored my PhD and had a wonderful supervisor.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall is one of the most well-known computer scientists in the UK. However, she started her academic career by gaining a first class honours in BSc Mathematics at Southampton. Wendy went on to achieve a PhD in Pure Maths, also at Southampton, in 1977 and went on to teach the subject before becoming interested in computing, returning to Southampton as a Lecturer in the new Computer Science group in 1984. As computer science became recognised as a subject she learned basic programming language but the development of the subject beyond basic coding to hypertext sparked her lifelong interest in what would eventually become web science.

Interviewed by Jim Al-Khalili on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific, she spoke about her passion for maths and science at an all-girls school in London before university and her initial ambition to become a school teacher.

Among her recent achievements, Wendy is a member of BBC Radio 4's Women's Hour Power List and named as the second most influential woman in UK IT in a poll published in Computer Weekly. With Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the University of Southampton's Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, she founded the Web Science Research Initiative in 2006, to foster Web Science as an academic discipline. She became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 2009 UK New Year's Honours list, and was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.