Creating connections in Yorkshire and the Humber

Ana Cavalcanti is a Professor at the University of York, UK, and holds a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies. In that role, she is Director of the RoboStar centre on Software Engineering for Robotics. She previously held a Royal Society Industry Fellowship, which provided her with the ideal opportunity to understand and contribute to the practice of formal methods working with QinetiQ.

Her main scientific achievements have been on the design and justification of sound program design and verification techniques. She has covered theoretical and practical integration with industry-strength technology. Her work provides support for graphical notations popular with engineers, and for main-stream programming languages. It also supports high degrees of automation to enable usability and scalability. She has chaired the Programme Committee of leading conferences, and been a member of numerous Programme Committees. Currently, she is the Chair of the Formal Methods Europe Board.

With a background in life sciences, serial entrepreneur Lynne Cadenhead has over 25 years’ start-up and equity investment experience in both technology and retail sectors and is currently CEO of her third start-up company, Immaculate Drinks. 

A passionate advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and for helping women globally to take charge of their own destiny, Lynne has served on over 30 Boards, is past Chair of UNICEF in Scotland, an Ambassador for Women on Boards, a Visiting Professor in Governance and Enterprise and Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence at Edinburgh Napier University. 

In 2020, Lynne was awarded the Institute of Directors Scotland Director of the Year award for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. In 2022 Lynne was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Open University for international services to gender equality in business.

She is Chief Operating Officer for TRICAPITAL Angels Ltd, Chair of Women’s Enterprise Scotland and served on the Scottish Government’s National Council for Economic Transformation.

Louise is Commercial Director at Health Innovation East leading a team that supports entrepreneurs and industry partners develop their products and services for implementation within the NHS and other healthcare systems. Louise has more than 25 years experience in drug discovery, development and commercialisation within academia, biotech and pharmaceutical organisations. Louise’s Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence project supports the Knowledge Exchange and Commercialisation team at the Babraham Institute to ‘accelerate fundamental life science research for talent development, population health benefit and wealth creation’.