Professor Ursula Martin CBE is a Professor of Computer Science in the University of Oxford, where she holds an EPSRC Research Fellowship. 

Prior to this she held  a chair of Computer Science in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London.  At Queen Mary she was Vice-Principal for Science and Engineering (2005-2009), and Director of the impactQM project (2009-2012). She served on the UK Defence Science Advisory Council, on the 2001 and 2008 UK HEFCE RAE panel for Computer Science, and was a SICSA distinguished visitor at the University of Edinburgh for 2012-13. 

She has previously held appointments at the University of St Andrews (the first female professor in any discipline since its foundation in 1411), Royal Holloway University of London, Manchester and Urbana Champaign. She holds an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge and a PhD in Mathematics from Warwick. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in January 2012. 

Throughout her career she has  worked at the interface of mathematics and computer science. Major contributions include an explanation of the power of Hoare logic, and results linking randomness and symmetry. Her work is characterized by strongly interdisciplinary collaboration in new problem domains, identifying novel interactions between theory and practice, and collaborations on solve real-world problems to inspire new scientific advance. She is involved nationally and internationally in policy and strategy through work for the European Research Council and the Ministry of Defence, and for learned societies. 

Ursula has also been involved in countless activities aimed at encouraging women in the fields of computing and mathematics, which is something that we at Royal Holloway are drawing inspiration from.