Background
Wendy Hall was born in west London and educated at Ealing Grammar School for Girls.
mathematician university professor computer scientist
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 (Bachelor of Science) degree in 1974 and her Doctor of Philosophy (Doctor of Philosophy) degree in 1977. She later completed a Master of Science degree in Computing at City University London.
Her doctoral thesis was titled Automorphisms and coverings of Klein surfaces. 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 Limited.
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 2002-2007. 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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hall was President of the British Computer Society from 2003 to 2004 and of the Association for Computing Machinery from 2008 to 2010.
Since 2014, Hall has served as a Commissioner for the Global Commission on Internet Governance.
Royal Society; British Computer Society. Institution of Engineering and Technology. City and Guilds of London Institute.
Association for Computing Machinery]
In 2010 she was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) "for contributions to the semantic web and web science and for service to Association for Computing Machinery (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.