Maria Klawe earned her B.Sc. and Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Alberta before embarking on a diverse academic and industry career. After a brief faculty appointment at Oakland University, she worked at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, progressing from research scientist to managerial roles. Maria spent 15 years at the University of British Columbia, serving as Head of Computer Science, Vice President of Student and Academic Services, and Dean of Science. She then became Dean of Engineering at Princeton University before being appointed the first woman president of Harvey Mudd College in 2006, a position she held until 2023. Renowned for her advocacy for women in STEM, Maria led transformative changes at Harvey Mudd, increasing female representation among students and faculty, and currently serves as President of Math for America. More info about her here.

Emma Robinson completed her PhD in medical image computing at Imperial College London in 2010, following research positions at FMRIB, University of Oxford, and BioMedIA. She is now a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Research Department of Biomedical Computing at King’s College London. Emma is renowned for developing computational methods for brain imaging, particularly her Multimodal Surface Matching (MSM) software, which has been central to the Human Connectome Project’s multimodal parcellation of the human cortex. Her research spans classical and AI-based approaches to neuroimaging, with recent work focusing on geometric deep learning for modeling cortical and cardiac surfaces, explainable AI for neuropsychiatric disease, and integrating multi-modality imaging with genetics. Emma serves on the board of Medical Imaging Deep Learning (MIDL) and is a handling editor for PLOS Computational Biology and Neuroimage. More info about her here.

Ulrike Harjes completed her undergraduate studies in molecular medicine at the University of Göttingen, Germany, and pursued postgraduate research in cancer biology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her doctoral work at the University of Oxford, UK, focused on Notch signalling in endothelial cell metabolism and tumour angiogenesis. Ulrike continued her research as a postdoctoral fellow with Adrian Harris and later in Peter Carmeliet’s laboratory at KU Leuven, Belgium, exploring vascular metabolism in cancer and diabetes. She joined Nature Reviews Cancer as an Associate Editor in 2017 and moved to Nature Medicine as a Senior Editor in 2022, where she handles papers in cancer and immunology. Ulrike is currently based in the Berlin office. Reach out to her on Bluesky here.