Women in Computability Mentorship Programme

I was born in Crema, a small city close to Milan. After a Master degree in Computer Science I did a PhD in Computer Science in Milan, but I spent one year in Boulder Colorado working on my PhD thesis (on graph structures) under the supervision of A. Ehrenfeucht and G. Rozenberg. It was a great experience of science and life since I just got married. I was hired as a research assistant professor during my PhD and then I started my career first at the University of Milan and then as a full Professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca, fighting to reconcile the desire to devote more time to research with the duties of being mother of two children. I joined the CiE community after attending the Amsterdam edition in 2005 by giving a talk on DNA splicing systems in a special session on Biological computational models. I soon felt to have many affinity with Barry Cooper, and we both took a liking to each other. I have always been attracted by a multidisciplinary approach to research, I found very interesting to adopt a formal computational approach in interpreting and understanding very applicative problems in biology. I am very curious and that is why I do not mind spending time to try to understand and debate open problems. I have been very honored to be the President of CiE from 2016 to 2020. My last achievement is being the coordinator of a MSCA-H2020 RISE network on computational pan-genomics, which gives me the opportunity to keep in contact with international and multidisciplinary views and face new challenges in the fascinating field of genome informatics.

My undergraduate studies are in philosophy. I studied at the University of Florence where I especially enjoyed logic and the history of science. The first logic courses I attended were taught by Ettore Casari, Maria Luisa Dalla Chiara and Andrea Cantini whose enthusiasm and dedication naturally brought me to choose logic as my dissertation topic. In the last year of my degree, I participated in the Erasmus program and visited the University of Leeds. As I was very attracted by topics in logic, I began to attend classes in mathematical logic in the School of Mathematics. On completion of my first degree, I enrolled on a PhD in Logic at the School of Mathematics, University of Leeds. This was a big change compared with my undergraduate studies, not only because of the new topics I was pursuing but also since at the start of my PhD I was the only woman in a large and fast growing logic group. After completion of my PhD, I held Postdoctoral positions in Munich, Florence and Leeds. I have worked on constructive Zermelo Fraenkel set theory, operational set theory and the proof theory there of. Over time, my original interest for foundational and philosophical questions became more and more urgent. Eventually, in 2012, I decided to start again with a new PhD, now in the philosophy of mathematics. At first my interest was chiefly on philosophical questions prompted by my mathematical experience in constructivism and proof theory. Since the completion of my second PhD, I have been Teaching Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham and I am presently Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Oslo. My current project explores predicativist and constructivist approaches to infinity.

I was born in Aalst, Belgium where I grew up. The spirit of that city
very much shaped me as a person through its industrial past and its
annual carnival. Since I was told in high school on a regular basis that
I was not too capable and was even advised not to attend university, I
decided not to go for physics (which was my first love) but for art
history and archeology. My parents very much supported me during this
time and convinced me that I am much more capable than I thought I was. During that study, I became interested in basic philosophical questions and decided to pursue a study in philosophy. It was then my reading of Martin Heidegger’s technique essay that convinced me of a need to engage myself with modern technique, that is, computation. I was able to get a PhD scholarship; I learned to program and started reading the foundational papers by Church, Post, Turing and Gödel. During the first year it became clear that my original supervisor did not want me to pursue my own path and tried to undermine me as a person. I was lucky enough to have a lot of support from my then boyfriend (now husband) as well as from several other PhD students – I decided to speak up and could finally change my supervisor. A lack of research context at my home university – history and philosophy of computing was not a popular topic – meant that I had to reach out to others and attend conferences that were not standard in my department. This is how I got involved with CiE. Despite a continuing struggle with self-confidence I never gave up because research was what I wanted to do. Today, I have the position I could only dream of several years ago: a permanent researcher at CNRS in France. I am now ready to help others in paving their own paths through the difficult world that is academia.

I am a Professor of Computer Science at King’s College London. I did my PhD in France and worked at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris before moving to King’s. I have always been interested in logic, more precisely,  in the applications of logic in computer science. Currently, I am working on three main topics with collaborators from UK and abroad:  the development of a modelling tool based on graph rewriting (PORGY), security models for cloud-IoT architectures and nominal techniques for the analysis of programming languages.

I was born and raised in Akademgorodok, a remote district of the 3rd largest Russian city Novosibirsk. Akademgorodok was built back in 1960s with the purpose to provide scientists a creative place to live and work. Living only 10 minutes away from the Novosibirsk State University, I always knew I would pursue a career in STEM. In my high school years I got fascinated by universality of Mathematics. I got my Bachelor and Master degrees in Mathematics at the Novosibirsk State University where I got familiar with the famous Siberian school of algebra and logic. I got my PhD in logic at the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics, under supervision of Sergey Goncharov. During my PhD studies I got a Fellowship of Russian President and used it to spend one year at the University of Notre Dame with Julia Knight. This is when I got conscious about the importance of having a female role model. A week after I had completed my PhD studies in 2008, I moved to Vienna where I got a postdoc position at the Kurt Gödel Research Center. The KGRC was famous for being a strong set theory center, and I was invited to widen its research profile by representing computability. For this reason, however, I had to start raising my own funds to support my research. I got several projects by the Austrian Science Fund FWF that allowed me to stay at the KGRC for seven years. During these years I participated at seminars, workshops and conferences organised by another logic group at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). In 2015 I got a job offer to join the computational logic group at the TU Wien as a non-tenure assistant. Later my contract was made permanent, in particular, thanks to the projects I got earlier, and this is where I am now: holding an Associate Professor position at the TU Wien.

When I was a child, I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer. By the time I started high school, I realized that I wanted to become a mathematician instead, and my undergraduate years at Carnegie Mellon University persuaded me that I wanted to study logic, surrounded as I was by mathematical and philosophical logicians. I wrote my master’s thesis in set theory at Carnegie Mellon, but as a graduate student in the logic group at Berkeley, I found that I was more interested in computability theory and wrote my dissertation in algorithmic randomness. After I earned my Ph.D. in 2007, I spent seven total years as a postdoc across five different institutions: the National University of Singapore, the Fields Institute, the University of Waterloo, Dartmouth College, and the University of Connecticut. While moving so much was exhausting, I learned about different subfields of computability theory and the corresponding proof techniques at each institution, which has made me a much more versatile researcher. My location seems to have converged to Hofstra University, where I find incredible joy in both my research and my teaching—and, in keeping with my original career intentions, in trying to turn my professional communities into communities that everyone will want to join.

I was born in Yugoslavia, in Belgrade where I grew up. Belgrade is a wonderful city with many cultural opportunities, and my loving parents and many of my teachers were very supportive of me during my school years. I studied mathematics at the University of Belgrade where I got my undergraduate degree in three years and then completed the master’s program. I got interested in logic, became a teaching assistant, and participated in the logic seminar at the Mathematical Institute. When Jerome Keisler visited and gave lectures at the University of Belgrade (at the invitation of Zarko Mijajlovic), I was inspired to apply to the PhD program at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. That is the only PhD program I applied to. At the University of Wisconsin, I took classes from Keisler, Barwise, Millar and Kunen, and met Kleene. I got free theatre tickets from Barwise (I was also his research assistant) and was invited to dinner parties at Rudins and Millars, with delicious food and stimulating conversations. I got particularly interested in computability theory and the emerging computable model theory in which my PhD adviser, Terry Millar, played a major role. He was very supportive of me and all of his students and graduated another female PhD student the same year I graduated, which was not so common at UW-Madison. I also met my husband at UW. After completing my PhD, I settled in Washington DC, another wonderful city, accepting a tenure-track position at the George Washington University, where I stayed and advanced through the academic ranks. Currently, I am professor of mathematics. I collaborate on research with many people in the US and abroad, and spent some of my sabbaticals at the University of Maryland, at the Gödel Institute in Vienna, and most recently (during covid-19 pandemic) co-organizing a virtual program at MSRI, Berkeley. 

I am a logician working in the philosophy, history and foundations of mathematics and logic, and in set theory.

 I grew up in Logan, Utah.  When I was in my first year of high school, in 1957, Russia gave to the scientific community in the U.S. a huge gift—Sputnik.  Suddenly, funding increased, and everyone with interest and ability in science and mathematics was encouraged to study these things.  I majored in mathematics at Utah State.  For graduate school, I went to Berkeley, a tremendously exciting place for mathematics, and for the social atmosphere.  My advisor was Robert Vaught.  Julia Robinson was also a mentor.  I started off in model theory.  As a model theorist, I especially liked problems that involved constructing models.  Later, I switched to computability theory.  I still like problems that involve constructing models.  I have been on the faculty at Notre Dame since 1977.  I have been lucky to have really fine students to work with.  During the past 20 years, I have been involved in a series of NSF grants aimed at fostering collaboration among researchers in computability from the U.S., Russia, Kazakhstan, and, more recently, Bulgaria.  The joint work that has resulted from these grants, and the friendships that I now have with international collaborators, mean a great deal to me.

When I was in high school I wanted to become a doctor but then in my senior year, thanks to a good teacher, I realized I loved math. I finished my BS in Mathematics in 1990 and then started reading about Theoretical Computer Science and talking to José Balcázar, whose enthusiasm infected me and who introduced me to resource-bounded measure and Jack Lutz with whom I have worked for the last 30 years. In 1994 I obtained my PhD in Computer Science and an academic job at the University of Zaragoza. Throughout the years I have been interested in various topics in Mathematics, Computer Science, and Biology with the common denominator of information content. Since 2007 I am a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Zaragoza with a collaborator appointment at Iowa State University, USA.

I was lucky to be born and to grow up in Padova, home to one of the oldest universities in Europe. After careful consideration, I decided to study Mathematics and chose among the available specializations the very traditional one in pure mathematics, with advanced courses in algebra, analysis, geometry, topology, and logic, that I soon discovered being my favourite subject. I wrote a Master’s  thesis on categorical models for linear logic and then  continued with a Ph.D. in mathematical logic.

The beginning of Ph.D. studies was high time to start broadening my academic horizon: while keeping the University of Padova as a base, I attended summer schools and spent research periods abroad, with very fruitful stays in Amsterdam and Göteborg.  In my Ph.D. thesis I shed fresh light on the interplay of algebra and topology as manifested in the Stone representation theorems, and questioned the very foundations of analysis and topology, obtaining constructive proofs of some of their milestones such as the theorems of Tychonoff,  Heine-Borel and Hahn-Banach.

After my Ph.D., given the academic job market in Italy of those days,  I headed to a Post-Doc abroad, and my only application was a successful one: I obtained a position of  research associate at the Imperial College in London, to work in a project on a computable approach to integration based on domain theory. That research interestingly merged with my previous work on formal spaces and also lead to publications on the foundations of domain theory in terms of formal topology.

In 1996 I moved to Helsinki, to work in a project on type theory and constructivism, hosted by the Department of Philosophy, a unit with a strong tradition in logic. That also marked my move to research in proof theory and modal logic.  My main discoveries were a method to convert axioms of mathematical theories into rules of inference and a very general way to obtain proof systems for modal logics that lacked analytic deductive systems; on the more philosophical side, I applied these methods to  formal epistemology. During this period, I also co-produced and raised three amazing children. I was quite busy, especially with several moves from one house to another and the do-it-yourself style of renovations in Finland, that left no time to reflect on how one can reconcile a family life and a career, so that question remained open.

The shortage of tenured positions in Helsinki led to an incredibly long period (18 years!) of almost full-time research (with little teaching) in projects mainly financed by the Academy of Finland. As a side effect, I had a very competitive scientific CV when the chair in Theoretical Philosophy was finally re-opened after 40 years, and in 2015 I won a competition for that professorship (re gender issues, I was the first woman professor in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki since the time it was funded in 1640!).

During my 25 years of life in Finland I have always maintained strong personal and scientific bonds with my home country. During 2013-2014 I got the National Scientific Qualification to associate and full professorship in Italian Universities for the academic fields of ”Logica Matematica e Matematiche Complementari” and ”Logica, Storia e Filosofia della Scienza”, and to associate professorship in ”Informatica”.  

I was thrilled when in 2018, rather in a sudden, the possibility of a professorship in mathematics at the University of Genoa came up, which position I took up in late 2019. As part of the new scenario, my teaching in Italy started exactly with the beginning of the lock-down in March 2020, and I had to switch to distance learning with only a few days notice.

For details on my research see

https://sites.google.com/view/saranegri/home

I will be happy to offer mentorship on the challenge of working under conditions of gender/ethnic/national minority, of moving between different academic fields and countries, of having small (and also bigger) children while attempting to start and pursue an academic career, and of facing unpredictable circumstances.

I did my PhD in Mathematics at the University of Palermo, where I’m currently Associate Professor. Since the time of my PhD, I have been very interested in exploring the connections between Automata and Formal Language Theory, Combinatorics on Words, and their applications in several contexts, especially in Bioinformatics. In fact, my PhD thesis was titled “Automata, forbidden words and applications to symbolic dynamics and fragment assembly”. In some of my most cited papers algorithms on strings are introduced or analyzed with interesting applications in Data Compression and Text Indexing. I have been invited speaker in several international conferences on research topics related to Automata and Formal languages and Algorithms on strings, such as WORDS, DLT, CiE (Special Session on Data Stream and Compression), IWOCA. I’m a member of the Editorial Board of the Elsevier international journal Theoretical Computer Science.

I am an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Swansea University.
After my doctorate in the Graduate Programme Logic in Computer Science at LMU Munich, I took up a position as a Research Assistant at Swansea, and subsequently as Lecturer and Programme Director for Computer Science. Since 5 years I am also Deputy Head of Department. Thus I have experience balancing work (not sure though whether the perfect balance exists) in Teaching, Research, Management, and in a dual career patchwork family, and I am happy to support others where this is of interest.

I am a Professor of Mathematics at the East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.  I am interested in problems of logic over objects studied in Number Theory or Algebra. So my research interests include Model Theory, Computability Theory and Number Theory.  My web page is myweb.ecu.edu/shlapentokha..

I started to like Mathematics at the end of middle school thanks to my fantastic teacher Nedjalkova.  I went to a special mathematical high school.  My undergraduate study was in Mathematics at Sofia University.  I took in advance some Master courses in Logic and Algorithms and  this inspired me to study Mathematical Logic in graduate school at Sofia University. After finishing my PhD I started as assistant professor at the same university, teaching Logic and  different topics of Computability. We started to work in computability on abstract structures with my husband Ivan Soskov and our teacher Prof. Skordev, who at that time just finished his book on algebraic recursion theory.  We saw the close relationship between enumeration degrees and abstract models of computability. At that time Barry Cooper invited us to join a big research project on Computability in Europe. We organized together in 2009  the Logic Colloquium in Sofia and in 2011 the CiE conference. Julia Knight invited us to be part of a project Collaboration in Computability together with Novosibirsk, Kazan and Kazakhstan and several researchers from the USA. Now I am a professor in Mathematical Logic  at Sofia University working mainly on complexity of structures, from the point of view of computability, on some specific structural properties such as jump inversion and definability. I am interested in how difficult is to code and decode one class of structures into another and in the connections between syntactic and semantic  properties and the information contents of structures.

I was born in Sofia, Bulgaria. As a kid I spent two years in LA, when my dad, also a logician, started getting worried that the fall of the communist regime and the food shortages it came with will be too severe for our family to bear. My dad Ivan Soskov had a position as an adjunct professor at UCLA. We returned home as soon as hope for a better life in Bulgaria emerged. I went to a German high school and then studied Computer Science as an undergraduate at Sofia University. I was drawn to mathematical logic and computability theory for many reasons: I had seen some of it in my undergraduate courses and it seemed to just make sense to me, but most significantly I remembered that when my father (an unknown young Bulgarian researcher) reached out to the logic community during a time of need, they gave him a chance and helped us out. I switched to mathematical logic for my masters degree, again at Sofia University. I went to graduate school at the University of Leeds. My supervisor Barry Cooper showed me the importance of mentorship. Thanks to him I later became involved with the CiE workshop series Women in Computability. I am now an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and am ready to help others figure out their best path through academia.

I’m an assistant professor of logic and philosophy of language in the
Department of Philosophy at Durham University.  My main areas of
research in logic are modal logic, both modern approaches/techniques and the history of the field.  I am also extremely interested in the teaching of logic to undergrads — especially non-mathematics students and students who don’t want to be taking logic, and I’d love to provide mentorship for people who are interested in logic pedagogy.  Outside of logic, I’ve got nine years experience navigating academia as a parent and am happy to talk about that as well.