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Associate Professor in Electrical and Electronic Engineering 

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'The science we study today will be the technology we build for tomorrow, keep following your dreams and never give up'.

Elizabeth is an associate professor in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and conducts research in high precision robotics and sensing at the Centre for Robotics and Sensing Technologies (CROSS-tech). She is passionate about encouraging young women to pursue careers in science and engineering, and she is especially motivated to inspire her eight-year-old daughter, Ellie.

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I'm a 3rd-year PhD student, and my research focuses on medical image registration and developing machine learning algorithms to enhance the efficiency of the registration process. Currently, I'm exploring longitudinal registration methods for neurodegenerative diseases that capture the morphology of structures over time. This can be used for disease progression analysis and better our understanding of temporal variations in medical imaging. In my free time I enjoy travelling!

No matter the challenges you face, keep moving forward!!

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Associate Professor in Experimental Physics

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Dr Kate Shaw is an experimental particle physicist working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN and the DUNE experiment at Fermilab focusing on areas in Top physics, Higgs physics, Luminosity calibration and measurement. She is currently Director of the Data Intensive Science Centre for Doctoral Training (DISCnet), the DUNE Education and Outreach Chair, and the ATLAS Open Data convener. Shaw is passionate and inclusion and diversity in science and works to promote physics in the Global South. Shaw founded and co-directs the ICTP Physics Without Frontiers programme, which works with a network of scientists to train and motivate physics and mathematics university students in over 50 countries worldwide and has helped hundreds of students from the Global South onto further study and careers in research. She won the European Physical Society Outreach Prize in 2015, the Sussex Better World Award in 2021, and The Royal Society Research Culture Award in 2024 for her work.

I'm inspired by and grateful to all the women and men before me who challenged the community and changed the environment so that more women like me could become physicists. Inclusion and diversity unfortunately must be fought for, and that fight is not over. Im proud to stand side by side with my colleagues all over the world who work to ensure every women and girl has opportunity to participate in and benefit from science.

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Associate Professor in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computation

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Dr Marianna Cerasuolo is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Applied Mathematics and co-director of DISCUS. Her research is specialised in mathematical and computational biology and focuses on data analysis and developing mathematical models for medical, biological, and environmental applications. She started her career as a mathematician at the University of Naples Federico II. She held several postdoctoral positions in Italy and the UK and worked as a Mathematical Modeller at the UK-based agricultural research centre Rothamsted Research.  In 2014, she became a lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, a senior lecturer in 2015 and a Reader at the University of Sussex in 2023. Her expertise spans complex systems, experimental data analysis, and the study of diffusion, delayed, and instantaneous processes. She has contributed to several interdisciplinary collaborations, integrating mathematical tools with cutting-edge biological research, including the design of optimal treatments for prostate cancer. She was awarded the Horizon 2020 project Diverfarming to develop models predicting the effects of diversified cropping systems on soil carbon. In 2023, she received the Horizon Europe BIOservicES project to analyse soil microbiome dynamics under climate change, further advancing sustainable agricultural practices. Her work bridges mathematics and science to address critical health and environmental challenges.

I never believed in the weaker-sex fairy tale I had been told growing up. For me, women are a force of nature! Just remember to be always true to yourself, never give up, and say “no" when needed!

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I am a second year PhD Candidate in Management at the University of Sussex, Business School. Currently my research is related with Technology and Employee Voice process (speaking up behavior). My work is supervised by Dr Zahira Jased and Dr Dimitra Petrakaki. I am particularly interested in how the voice travels through AI chatbots in companies and how certain types of technology used in the workplaces shape the voice process. At the same time I am involved in the research project about AI use in Recruitment. I have more than 10 years of HR practice in corporate banking.

My story behind joining US:

In the last 10 years, I have built a very sustainable career in leading company in my country - Azerbaijan. I have climbed ladders from being intern to the Head of Department in Organizational Development. However, I always had passion to research and was always interested in going beyond of business tasks and seek answers to the questions starting with “why?” or “how”. This curiosity led me to pursue my profession at CIPD Level 7 in Strategic People Management. It was during that time, the begining of my program that I discovered employee voice concepts that shaped my current research theme. And I decided to leave my well established corporate career behind and start everything from scratch with no job and a field where I will be dealing with a lot of uncertainties. Away from family and my 7 year old son, my first year of PhD Journey was a mix of failures, successes, stress and immense learning. Yet, I made it progress and advance every day during last year. And now I love what I do, I deeply enjoy where learning is endless, horizons of exploration is just endless that fuels my passion of exploring technology and its impact on employee voice.

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Karrie Liu is a part time Doctoral Researcher Maths/Data Science. She is the Winner for the WISE Outstanding Woman in Science Award 2024 /She Inspires Award (in STEM) 2023.

Growing up in two distinct family cultures (Chinese parents in Hong Kong and “adoptive” English parents in the UK), I notices that girls aren’t often encouraged in the same way that boys are. Many Asian parents would prefer that their daughters marry and focus on family rather than pursuing study in higher education. Due to this, I wish to be a role model to younger generations, especially girls, so that they may be inspired and have courage to follow their dreams. My ultimate goal is to improve the world through data science and technology. Hence that is why I set up a Hypatia Analytics Ltd, which allowed me to able to spend more time on different type of charities works.

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Associate Professor in Computer Science & AI

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A day for celebrating women and girls for me starts with those in my story. My name is Temitayo Olugbade, and I am a research scientist in an area some call 'Emotion AI'. I am currently Assistant Professor at University of Sussex. Before this, I was a postdoctoral research associate, and also completed PhD (Affective Computing), at University College London, both with Prof Nadia Berthouze as my supervisor, mentor, and some. But this story started with an interest in maths in my early years when my mum tutored and coached me, turning it from a subject I didn't like to a language that made sense to me. I obtained a First Class Honours degree for a strongly engineering programme owing to her foundation. I hope I pass on some of this inspiration in my own steps--one of those steps that I am most proud of is pursuing an interest in AI, especially at a time when a career in AI didn't make sense to many. I celebrate all women: they are strong, intelligent, rich in healthy emotions, 100% human, and can do absolutely anything!

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Julie Weeds is a Professor in Artificial Intelligence and co-director of SussexAI, a Centre of Excellence at the University of Sussex. She has a first in Computer Science from Cambridge and has been carrying out research in the area of Natural Language Processing since 2000, when AI tools like ChatGPT were still confined to dreams and science fiction. She is also a mother of now-teenage boy-girl twins who have been brought up to believe that gender is irrelevant and they can be whoever they want to be. Sometimes you will surprise people by not conforming to their expectations, but life would be very boring otherwise!

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Associate Professor in Media and Cultural Studies

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I am a first-generation scholar – it was my older sister who encouraged me and my twin sister to go to University, despite us being from a low income family and having parents who (understandably) weren’t sure the expense was worth it. With the help of state funding, I went on to do my undergraduate at Sussex, and later my MA and PhD. My expertise in AI and Digital Media is strongly shaped by my studies at Sussex, where I learned about socio-cultural implications of technology, feminist ethics and methods, and the potential for bias in data-driven systems. I am grateful to my sister for her courage and resolve that University was worth the expense and the uncertainty – through my work on AI, profiling and ethics I’m now helping to shape the research that so engaged me as a student.

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I am a VLSI front-end designer and Research Fellow in the School of Engineering and Informatics at the University of Sussex. I am designing hardware for Artificial Intelligence systems on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). Presently, my focus is to design energy efficient Vector Processor as an extenstion to the RISCV processor. I completed my Ph.d. from Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, India. I have worked as an assistant professor for six years in Electronics and Communication Engineering department and as a research fellow for three years in India.  I have 17 international journal and conference publications along with 3 book chapters. I have won the state's annual young scientist award in India in the year 2020.

It feels great to stand in this platform of women scientists @ Sussex. I am grateful to my parents who raised 6 daughters and taught them to have self-belief. Women may be underestimated but the God has designed the brains of men and women with equal capabilities. Since women are held responsible to nurture the family, I have witnessed many of them have pursued shining careers while raising socially responsible and successful children. To every woman I would like to say, believe that you can do it and work hard to the last minute of the day. Believe that the recipe to success is a mix of discipline, perseverance, and learning with a dash of confidence and you are ready to conquer the world.

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Antonella De Santo is a Professor of Physics at the University of Sussex. She founded and leads the Sussex team working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s world-leading Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which in 2012 co-discovered the Higgs boson – the last building block of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Professor De Santo’s searches for new phenomena at the frontiers of particle physics, such as dark matter or other exotic particles at the LHC, where unprecedented high rates of high-energy proton-proton collisions generate rich datasets at the tune of 60 terabytes per second. Sophisticated data analysis techniques, often employing ML methods, are used to sift through vast amounts of data and understand elementary particles and their interactions on scales never explored before.

Professor De Santo obtained her PhD from the University of Pisa, Italy. She has conducted research at world-renowned institutions such as CERN, the University of Oxford, Royal Holloway, University of London, and Fermilab. Before working on ATLAS, she spent a decade searching for neutrino oscillations at accelerator-based experiments at CERN and in the US. Professor De Santo became Sussex’s first female Professor of Physics in 2013. In 2017 she was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.

“Follow your curiosity, listen to your passion, and keep your dreams. Science is for everyone.”

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The reason I choose to be a scientist is to see how far I can go in the academic field. With microscopy, I visualize molecules and study their dynamics beyond the diffraction limit. With science, I live a challenging life and keep moving beyond my own limit. Would I recommend other woman to get involved with science? I think science might not be the suitable for everyone, but it shall be the best option to prove your value. All our work is meaningful and will be recorded for the development of world.

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I love being a woman and I love being an experimental particle physicist, in that order.

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Science isn’t just about laboratories and test tubes—it’s about solving real-world problems. My career journey has been anything but traditional, but at its core, it has always been about exploring innovative ways to advance justice.

I started with a BSc in Psychology and Cognitive Science, fascinated by how humans think and interact with systems. I then trained in Law, working in both the UK and overseas, where I became deeply interested in how legal systems serve—or fail to serve—those who need them most.

After a decade as a corporate lawyer, I transitioned into human rights law, working on projects that focused on making justice more accessible and affordable. Moving to Tanzania in 2015 deepened my commitment to justice innovation, particularly in supporting women facing legal barriers in marital, inheritance, and land rights.

Now, I work at the intersection of AI, law, and social change, exploring how artificial intelligence can increase access to justice. My PhD research has been a bridge between disciplines, combining law, informatics, and development studies to explore real-world applications of technology to increase access to justice services.

Women and girls in science are breaking barriers, not just in traditional STEM fields but in applied sciences—where technology meets society. My journey shows that AI isn’t just about machines—it’s about people. I hope more women from around the world step into the space where science meets justice, because we need diverse perspectives and experiences to solve societies most pressing issues.