Wendy Hall

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Wendy Hall is Professor of Computer Science University of Southampton in southern England.

Wendy Hall was born in the East End of London. She studied for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in mathematics at the University of Southampton. She returned 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 commercialized 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 to 2007.

She was awarded a CBE in June 2000, and became a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) that year too. 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 also has honorary degrees from Oxford Brookes University, Glamorgan University, Cardiff University, and the University of Pretoria.

In 2006, Hall is founding director, with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel Weitzner, of the Web Science Research Initiative, to promote the discipline of Web Science and foster research collaboration between the University of Southampton and MIT.

In 2008 Hall was elected as the President of the Association for Computing Machinery, the premier professional society for computing.

Hall is particularly interested in promoting women in computing in particular and science in general.

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