Latest - Decades: 2000s

Sir Edmund Burton

Sir Edmund Burton is a retired general and an experienced and highly innovative senior executive with extensive experience within the UK defence and security community operating at both ministerial and board level.  He has been a staunch advocate of the importance of treating information as a key business asset and of protecting it accordingly.  Formerly executive chairman of the UK national Police IT Organisation leading a major business improvement programme, a knowledge adviser to the Cabinet Office, other government departments, private sector and academia on information assurance processes and the need for education and training.

Sir Rod Aldridge

Leading social and business entrepreneur and founder of Capita Group

In 1987 Sir Rod Aldridge OBE created Capita as an independent firm (breaking away from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy) running contracts for local authorities and central government. It is now the largest business process outsourcing and professional services company in the UK.

On retirement from Capita in 2006, Rod established the Aldridge Foundation and became one of the first sponsors of the government’s Academy Programme.

The Foundation works in challenging communities and has so far unlocked £300m government funding to build new academies.

A woman with long fair hair and a fringe smiling. It is a portrait style photo. She has a brick wall behind her.

Hayley Sudbury

Hayley Sudbury is founder and CEO of WERKIN, a company which helps to create, track and activate mentoring and career development programmes, supporting workplace inclusion like professional LGBT+ communities, and BAME talents. She is an active mentor of Stemettes speaker for Founders for Schools. She is an ambassador of LB Women, a network created to inspire, inform and celebrate success of professional lesbian and bisexual women. She is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and in 2017 and ’18 Hayley was on the OUTstanding Financial Times Leading 100 LGBT+ Executives list.

Professor Cliff Jones

Cliff Jones began working in the computing industry immediately after leaving school in 1961.  Cliff worked at LEO, then at IBM, which he left in 1963 to work for a year each at, first Esso, and then Ford where he began his work in programming and development of compilers.  Unusually, Cliff then moved back to IBM in 1965.  Cliff left industry in 1979 to return to education, completing a DPhil at Oxford University under Turing Award winner, Tony Hoare.   Following this, Cliff took a chair in 1981 at Manchester University and continued work on formal aspects of computing until 1996.  Another brief spell in industry at the small software house, Harlequin, followed.  Cliff came to a professorship at Newcastle University in 1999 where he remained until his retirement in the summer of 2018.

Dame Wendy Hall CBE

Dame Wendy Hall is a British computer scientist and Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and an Executive Director of the Web Science Institute.  She was Dean of the Faculty of Physical Science and Engineering at the University of Southampton from 2010 to 2014.  Between 2002 and 2007 she was Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, where she was founding Head of the Intelligence, Agents, and Multimedia Research Group.  In 2000 she was awarded a CBE and became a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.  She is also a distinguished Fellow of the BCS, a Fellow of the IET, and of the City and Guilds of London Institute, and holds a number of honorary degrees.  She became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 2009 UK New Year’s Honours list, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in the same year. 

John O’Connell

John O’Connell is a high-profile London-based technology entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist. He founded Staffware, one of the then leading software companies in the UK, which he sold in 2004. Since then he has personally invested in fourteen technology businesses, having chaired the vast majority of them. He also chaired and co-owned the professional rugby club then known as London Wasps. At present he is Chairman of Active Navigation, and he is the founder and Chairman of ScaleUp Group,

Shirine Khoury-Haq

Shirine’s career has been a transition from finance to consulting, and then to operations. She started in the US public sector before moving on to telecommunications, consumer products, retail and then insurance. She has led global teams delivering large scale technology and business change in FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 organisations, including several mergers and acquisitions. She has worked in the US, UK, across Europe and in Asia Pacific. She spent her childhood traveling around the world due to her father’s job and had lived on every continent except for Antarctica before the age of 12.