Prof Dame Wendy Hall's reaction to her honour

When we learned of the New Year's honour bestowed upon web sciences pioneer Prof Wendy Hall, of the University of Southampton, we naturally approached her for her reaction. It didn't make it in time for the article, but it did arrive. Over to Dame Wendy:

Personally of course I’m thrilled as are my family and friends. But it is also a tribute to the many people I have worked with over the years both at Southampton and in the wider community.

There aren't many dames in computer science (!) so I'm hoping that my honour will help attract positive attention to the subject and encourage others to follow in my footsteps – particularly women of course. Considering the impact that computers have on every aspect of our lives, not enough people from our industry are recognised for the work that they do.

We need to encourage more young people into science and engineering generally and I'm hopeful we are going to see some breakthroughs in this respect in the next year or two.

Governments worldwide are talking about the need for innovation to help us out of the current financial crisis, and innovation is driven by science and engineering. If we are able to attract more people into science and engineering careers, we need to make sure that computer science and the IT industry play their full role in this renaissance. That would be my wish for 2009 anyway.

And so say all of us.