First ever awards ceremony celebrating Midlands women in technology

The inaugural Midlands Women in Technology Awards showcased some of the region’s brightest female stars in Tech.

Congratulations to all finalists at Midlands Women in Tech Awards 2019. Here’s a list of the night’s winners:

Start Up Founder Award – Sonu Bubna (Shopper.com)

Sonu is part of the team behind Shopper.com, a B2C couponing platform based in UK. Shopper.com combines crowd power and artificial intelligence to help thousands of shoppers save money on eCommerce stores. With over 35k+ global stores on the platform, shopper.com is one of the fastest-growing community-driven couponing platforms.

Apprentice Award – Shannon Lynch (JLR)

Shannon Lynch is part of the Jaguar Land Rover Degree Apprenticeship programme. In her current role, she specialises in Chassis Associative Vehicle (CAV) architecture, which combines the skills of Computer Aided Design (CAD), Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) and Scripting to automate design processes that save time and increase robustness.

Rising Star Award – Emily Lawton (REPL Group)

Emily works at REPL – a technology and consulting group. Founded in 2007 by a specialist team with highly-successful retail careers, the company claims to have “both experience and expertise to deliver visionary professional services and unique solutions that transform business operations”. Working internationally with some of the biggest and best companies in the world, REPL partners with them to solve their business issues and drive even greater success.

Academic Award – Paula Mendes (University of Birmingham)

Professor Mendes has been making significant and varied contributions to the development of advanced technologies to address current biotechnological and healthcare challenges. This includes innovative in-situ sensor technology to accelerate the safe, clinical efficacious and cost-effective translation of cell therapies into clinical practice. She is also pioneering technology that aims at detecting cancer at early stage and in a more accurate manner.

Tech for Good Award – Cate Rae (Widgit Software)

Cate’s company’s ever-expanding symbol set follows a set of simple language rules that enable users to independently learn new concepts.  Translated into many languages, the Widgit Symbols are used worldwide to help users of all ages, abilities and backgrounds who have difficulty with text or communication.

Innovator Award – Melissa Snover (Nourish3d)

Melissa Snover is an award-winning entrepreneur who has founded and run several successful businesses. She is a visionary and trendsetter in the food tech industry and has launched innovative brands such as Katjes Magic Candy Factory (the world’s first 3D printer for sweets and confectionery). Despite the commercial success of her previous businesses, she wasn’t satisfied with just disrupting the confectionery industry and wanted to find a way to truly impact people’s everyday lives with her 3D printing technology. Irritated with the lack of truly customisable vitamins on the market she sought to create a product around personalised nutrition. In May 2018, she developed a prototype and brought NOURISH3D to the UK market, just a few months later.

Best Digital Lead Award – Pat Crossley-Smith (Methods)

Pat Crossley-Smith came into her current organisation at a very challenging time, initially taking on the delivery responsibility for a new and key account. Her success in the role led to her being appointed as Digital Executive Director. In this position, she took on the management responsibility for the whole of the digital practice across the UK, at a time when many within that practice were unsettled by the changes taking place. Her supportive management style has seen an increase in the % of women across Digital Practice as well as a reduced attrition rate. She has stated that if she won the award tonight she would not see it as winning for herself “but something for the team”.

Shining Star Award – Amandip Jheeta (TATA Consultancy)

Amandip Jheeta has worked as part of the banking and manufacturing industry in IT delivery and execution roles. Working on Multiple Application & Hardware Upgrade Projects – successfully delivering numerous upgrades of critical legacy applications. For the last 8 years she has worked with JLR and TATA. Frequently the sole female in large teams of men, she has successfully managed end to end large scale and budget complex programmes across different technologies from EUS, infrastructure to SAP. Most recently she has been part of a Diversity and Inclusion team. Her objective is to encourage more diverse teams “based on skill set and not on genetic makeup”

Lifetime Achievement Award – Mary Lee Berners-Lee

Mary Lee Berners-Lee was a pioneer of the computing age. Born in 1924 in Birmingham where she graduated from the University of Birmingham with a degree in mathematics. She once proudly described herself as the “grandmother of the web” – her son being Sir Tim Berners Lee – the inventor of the world wide web. Though later in life she became equally adept at using high-level languages such as Fortran, she loved the precision of writing programs in machine code. She once described programming as problem solving.

See the full set of images here by Jas Sansi: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jassansi/albums/72157711187148668