Creating connections in Yorkshire and the Humber

Ana Cavalcanti is a Professor at the University of York, UK, and holds a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies. In that role, she is Director of the RoboStar centre on Software Engineering for Robotics. She previously held a Royal Society Industry Fellowship, which provided her with the ideal opportunity to understand and contribute to the practice of formal methods working with QinetiQ.

Her main scientific achievements have been on the design and justification of sound program design and verification techniques. She has covered theoretical and practical integration with industry-strength technology. Her work provides support for graphical notations popular with engineers, and for main-stream programming languages. It also supports high degrees of automation to enable usability and scalability. She has chaired the Programme Committee of leading conferences, and been a member of numerous Programme Committees. Currently, she is the Chair of the Formal Methods Europe Board.

Alastair Lewis is professor of atmospheric chemistry at the University of York and the National Centre for Atmospheric Science. He is an experimental scientist who has studied the composition of the atmosphere and the impacts of pollution from polar regions to megacities, open oceans to tropical forests. He has received the John Jeyes Prize for Environment, Energy and Sustainability and the Royal Society of Chemistry award for contributions to science policy. Alastair has been Chair of the Defra Air Quality Expert Group (AQEG) since 2019, Chair of the Department for Transport Science Advisory Council since 2021 and a member of the Environmental Sustainability Panel of the Civil Aviation Authority. He has been a contributor to >300 scientific papers, chapters and reports on topics spanning transport, combustion and environmental impacts, measurement technology, air pollution and health effects. He currently holds a Royal Society Industrial Fellowship working with global chemicals manufacturer Givaudan SA.

Pooja is a Kenyan-born "modern nomad".

She graduated with a First class (Hons) MChem (Chemistry) degree from Coventry University which included an industrial placement at GlaxoSmithKline. This was followed by a PhD at the University of Warwick with late Professor Mark Rodger, which was jointly funded by industry (Cabot Speciality Fluids) and the Warwick Postgraduate Scholarship. 

Pooja was a post-doctoral researcher at the Division of Materials Theory at Uppsala University, Sweden, on a EU-FP7 project looking at diagnosing malaria using a magneto-optical technique. After 3.5 years she joined the University of Bath as an EPSRC Research Officer working on modelling sustainable energy materials with applications in fuel cells, lithium ion batteries and thin film photovoltaics. She has since been a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield, before joining Loughborough as a Lecturer and currently holds the title of Reader in Materials Modelling.

With a background in life sciences, serial entrepreneur Lynne Cadenhead has over 25 years’ start-up and equity investment experience in both technology and retail sectors and is currently CEO of her third start-up company, Immaculate Drinks. 

A passionate advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and for helping women globally to take charge of their own destiny, Lynne has served on over 30 Boards, is past Chair of UNICEF in Scotland, an Ambassador for Women on Boards, a Visiting Professor in Governance and Enterprise and Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence at Edinburgh Napier University. 

In 2020, Lynne was awarded the Institute of Directors Scotland Director of the Year award for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. In 2022 Lynne was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Open University for international services to gender equality in business.

She is Chief Operating Officer for TRICAPITAL Angels Ltd, Chair of Women’s Enterprise Scotland and served on the Scottish Government’s National Council for Economic Transformation.

Louise is Commercial Director at Health Innovation East leading a team that supports entrepreneurs and industry partners develop their products and services for implementation within the NHS and other healthcare systems. Louise has more than 25 years experience in drug discovery, development and commercialisation within academia, biotech and pharmaceutical organisations. Louise’s Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence project supports the Knowledge Exchange and Commercialisation team at the Babraham Institute to ‘accelerate fundamental life science research for talent development, population health benefit and wealth creation’.