Latest - Organisation: Ford Motor Company

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.

A portrait photo of a man in a shirt, tie and jacket, smiling

Roger Graham OBE

Roger Graham OBE helped to develop 3,000 IT jobs and £500 million of shareholder value in his IT career. He helped develop and sell one of the most important software packages for modern banking: MIDAS. He started work in the IT industry in IBM rising to be account manager for Ford UK. He left IBM after four-and-a-half years to join BIS, then a small software start up. MIDAS handled currency transactions when they were deregulated and also gold transactions. He left BIS in the early 1990s and has acted as a non-executive advisor to over 24 companies in 22 years.