Last year’s Ada Lovelace Day Live! event, held with BCSWomen, was such an amazing success that we decided to do it again on 16 October! This year, we are collaborating with the Women’s Engineering Society who will be presenting the prestigious Karen Burt Memorial Award to a newly chartered woman engineer at the event.
As well as the announcement of the award winner, we’ll be spoiling you with performances from:
- Dr Suzie Sheehy, accelerator physicist
- Gia Milinovich, technology and TV presenter
- Dr Helen Scales, marine biologist
- Helen Keen, comedian
- Dr Alice Bell, science communicator
- Sarah Angliss, robot maker and thereminist
- Sydney Padua, creator of the Lovelace & Babbage webcomic
All hosted by inimitable songstress and one third of the Festival of the Spoken Nerd, Helen Arney!
Rest assured, it will be an entertaining evening of science, technology, comedy and song, featuring all manner of wonders, from marine biology and particle physics to the secrets of fridges and performance robots. Seriously, Ada Lovelace Day Live! is an event not to be missed!
Tickets are £10 each and available from the WES site. Do not miss out!
Thanks to our partnership with WES, we’ll be holding ALD Live! at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, Savoy Place, London. This is apt not least because the IET archives holds a small collection of letters, written by Ada Lovelace to Michael Faraday in 1844, as well as a letter from Charles Babbage to Faraday in which Babbage describes Lovelace as an ‘enchantress’! The IET also has a copy, by Mary Remington, of the 1836 portrait of Lovelace by Margaret Carpenter.
About WES and the Karen Burt Memorial Award
Founded in 1919, WES is “a professional, not-for-profit network of women engineers, scientists and technologists offering inspiration, support and professional development.”
Although the world has changed since a group of women decided to band create an organisation to support women in engineering, the need is still there. WES works to connect students with professionals, organise events to support young people, and provide career support and networking groups.
Karen Burt was a WES Council officer who campaigned to improve the recruitment and retention of women in science and engineering. She was instrumental in the establishment of the Centre for Advanced Instrumentation Systems at University College, London, but her career at UCL was cut tragically short by a stroke.
The Karen Burt Memorial Award was first presented in 1999 to Rebecca Dowsett, and is given each year to a Chartered woman in engineering, applied science, and IT.
“The award recognizes the candidate’s excellence and potential in the practice of engineering and highlights the importance of Chartered status, as well as offering recognition to contributions made by the candidate to the promotion of the engineering profession.”