Bristol innovation hub Engine Shed and SETsquared, the world-leading incubator, are to stage an Ada Lovelace Day event to showcase opportunities for women and girls in tech.
The event, on Tuesday 8 October, will also be an opportunity to hear from inspirational women in the industry. 
It is being staged in celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, the woman widely regarded as the first computer programmer, and will bring together a panel of women in science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) to talk about their tech careers and how they have developed into something much more entrepreneurial.
It will also be an opportunity to network.
The panel will include:
- Angela Loveridge, founder, Cyber Scholars
- Helen Lloyd, co-founder of the fintech start-up Xavier Analytics
- Helen Tanner, founder, Data3
- Natalie Thurlby, data science specialist, University of Bristol’s Jean Golding Institute.
Angela’s vision is to prevent teenage wannabe hackers from getting criminal records and in doing so identify the next generation of cyber security professionals. She is passionate about supporting children/young people so that they can flourish online and as an independent online safety consultant was nominated for the NSPCC/AoCPP award of Child Protection Trainer of the Year 2018. She utilises her background in IT, both academic (MSc IT) and professional (data management and financial crime analysis) and also brings her personal experience of raising tech savvy children to her work. 
Helen Lloyd was previously front-end director at web development agency Hatch Apps, before co-founding Bristol-based Xavier Analytics. She has had more than seven years’ experience as a designer and analyst and transferred her skills into front-end web development five years ago. She has a background in psychology with a masters’ degree in neuroscience and continues to apply her love of data and understanding of human behaviour to product design and UX. She was recently named as one of the Rising Stars in the Innovate Finance Women in Fintech Powerlist 2018.
Helen Tanner set up Bristol-based Data3 in 2017 and she’s loved working on big and small data projects ever since. Born in the corporate world, she worked at a senior level for big global businesses. With a career spanning oceanography, meteorology, wealth management, insurance and equity, she is not your usual data-driven business leader. Data3 helps small and medium-sized firms improve their business performance using data.
Natalie joined the Jean Golding Institute as its data science specialist last year. Her main responsibilities include helping researchers at the university with data science queries through the Ask JGI service and carrying out data science projects. After completing her first degree in maths and physics at the University of Manchester, she moved to Bristol to study for her PhD in computational biology, which she is currently finishing. Her research focuses on predicting human phenotype and protein function using clustering and outlier detection methodologies.
The panel will be chaired by SETsquared Bristol director Monika Radclyffe. Monika manages the centre’s strategy and delivery of incubation activity to the 80-plus hi-tech ventures. Her career includes setting up a student incubator at the University of Westminster, running an entrepreneurial community of 6,000 members, setting up two co-working spaces and a digital acceleration programme at Dreamstake, facilitating open innovation programmes between corporates, academics and start-ups, running global innovation events at Fortune 500 firm Cognizant and leading delivery on fintech innovation programmes at ENTIQ.
The event lasts from 4-6pm. For more information and to register go to https://adalovelaceday2019.eventbrite.co.uk
