Wendy Hall

Dame Wendy Hall, DBE, FRS, FREng (born 25 October 1952) is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, England.

Wendy Hall was born in west London and educated at Ealing Grammar School for Girls. She studied for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in mathematics at the University of Southampton. She completed her Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree in 1974, and her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 1977. Her doctoral thesis was titled Automorphisms and coverings of Klein surfaces. She later completed a Master of Science degree in Computing at City University London.

Hall returned to the University of Southampton in 1984 to join the newly formed computer science group there, working in multimedia and hypermedia. Her team invented the Microcosm hypermedia system (before the World Wide Web existed), which was commercialised as a start-up company, Multicosm Ltd.

Hall was appointed the University's first female professor of engineering in 1994. She then served as Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science from 2002–07.

In 2006, Hall became a founding director of the Web Science Research Initiative (now called the Web Science Trust), along with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Sir Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel Weitzner, in order to promote the discipline of Web Science and foster research collaboration between the University of Southampton and MIT.

Hall was President of the British Computer Society from 2003-04 and of the Association for Computing Machinery from 2008-10. Since 2014, she has served as a Commissioner for the Global Commission on Internet Governance.

Hall was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2000 Birthday Honours. She was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2009 New Year Honours.

Hall also has honorary degrees from Oxford Brookes University, Glamorgan University, Cardiff University, and the University of Pretoria.

In 2000, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng). She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) (also serving as President) and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET). In 2002, she was appointed a Fellow of the City and Guilds (FCGI). Hall was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2009.

Her nomination for the Royal Society reads:

Distinguished for her contribution to understanding the interactions of humans with large scale multimedia information systems. Her early ideas which developed in parallel with development of the world wide web, www, are now forming key elements of subsequent development into the Semantic Web. Her most recent work focuses on the development of a new field of Web Science focused on understanding and exploring the various influences, science, commerce, public, politics which drive the evolution of the www. Her research is aimed at both understanding the evolution of the web and engineering its future.

In 2010, she was named a Fellow of the ACM "for contributions to the semantic web and web science and for service to ACM and the international computing community." She is a member of the Advisory Council for the Campaign for Science and Engineering, and a member of the Academia Europaea.

She was one of the 30 women identified in the BCS Women in IT Campaign in 2014 and was featured in the e-book of these 30 women in IT, “Women in IT: Inspiring the next generation” produced by the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, as a free download e-book, from various sources.

In February 2013, she was assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4. In her Desert Island Discs in 2014, on the same radio channel, she chose Wikipedia as the book she would most like if abandoned on a desert island.

Dame Wendy Hall is married to Dr Peter Chandler, a plasma physicist.