Judging panel
Meet our judges — visionaries and revered luminaries shaping the future of technology.
Magdalena Skipper
Editor in Chief, Nature
Dame Stephanie Shirley
IT Entrepreneur, Founder of The Stephanie Shirley Foundation
Panel co-chair Magdalena Skipper is Editor in Chief of Nature and Chief Editorial Advisor to the Nature Portfolio. She is a fellow of the International Science Council and is a member of the NASEM The Strategic Council for Research Excellence, Integrity, and Trust and the Scientific Advisory Council for the UK Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists. She holds a PhD in genetics from the University of Cambridge. She is a champion of women in research, collaboration, positive research culture and transparent science.
Panel co-chair Dame Stephanie Shirley CH, (90) is a successful IT entrepreneur turned philanthropist. In 1962, she founded a pioneering all-woman software company in the UK, which was ultimately valued at $3 billion and made millionaires of 70 of her male and female team. Since retiring in 1993, her focus has been increasingly on philanthropy, focused on IT and her late son’s condition of autism.
Victoria Alonsoperez
Inventor / entrepreneur, Chipsafer + IEETech
Olga Bubnova
Chief Editor of Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering
Rebecca Enonchong
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of AppsTech
Victoria Alonsoperez is a Uruguayan inventor and Founder & CEO of Chipsafer, based in Singapore. She is an Electronics & Telecommunications Engineer and her patented inventions pioneered the satellite-enabled livestock tracking industry. She is a UN Young Leader for the Sustainable Development Goals, an International Chamber of Commerce Small Business Champion, and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. She has a passion for space and for neurodiversity advocacy, with expertise in satellite technology, the internet of things and sustainability.
Olga Bubnova received her master's degree in mechanical engineering from SSAU, Russia. After graduation, she spent three years working as a system engineer in the automotive industry. In 2008, she began her studies on organic thermoelectrics at Linköping University in Sweden, where she went on to obtain her PhD in 2013. She worked at the University of Cambridge as a postdoctoral researcher, focusing on organic PV. Olga joined Nature Research in October 2015 and worked at Nature Nanotechnology before becoming Chief Editor at Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering in 2023.
Rebecca Enonchong is a Cameroonian technology entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of AppsTech. She is best known for her work promoting technology in Africa.
In 2002, The World Economic Forum of Davos, Switzerland named Rebecca a Global Leader for Tomorrow (GLT); In March 2014, Forbes listed her as one of the ‘10 Female Tech Founders to Watch in Africa’.She has spent much of her career promoting technology in Africa; she was the founder and Chairperson of the Africa Technology Forum, a non-profit dedicated to helping technology startups.
Makiko Kan
Distinguished Engineer of Sony Group Corporation
Hiroaki Kitano
Executive Deputy President and CTO of Sony Group Corporation
Geetha Manjunath
CEO & CTO, Niramai
Makiko Kan has been actively engaged in the research and development of channel coding, specifically focusing on probabilistic codes such as Turbo and LDPC codes, since joining Sony in 2000. The codes and associated technologies she developed have been widely adopted for digital broadcasting systems worldwide, becoming an integral part of television sets globally. She has been serving as a Corporate Distinguished Engineer at Sony since 2020 and holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics. As a Distinguished Engineer, she actively promotes diversity initiatives throughout the engineering community at Sony.
Hiroaki Kitano is Executive Deputy President and Chief Technology Officer of Sony Group Corporation, overseeing the R&D ecosystem across Sony's diverse businesses, including electronics, semiconductors, and entertainment. Additionally, he is CEO of Sony Research Inc. and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. (Sony CSL). His work at Carnegie Mellon University to build large-scale data-driven AI systems on massively parallel computers led to The Computers and Thought Award from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 1993. Kitano is the Founding President of the RoboCup Federation, president of IJCAI (2009-2011), and a member of scientific advisory boards for numerous academic institutions, including the European Molecular Biology Laboratory(EMBL), and a professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate School.
Geetha Manjunath is an Indian entrepreneur and computer scientist. She is the founder and CEO of NIRAMAI Health Analytix, a Bengaluru based start-up that provides non-invasive, radiation free breast cancer screening through AI.
NIRAMAI, which stands for “Non-Invasive Risk Assessment with Machine Intelligence,” uses portable technology to detect breast cancer and is working on detecting the presence of the parasitic worm that causes river blindness. The company is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr Manjunath holds 16 US patents for her work and in 2020, she was named on one of the Forbes List Top 20 Self-Made Women India.
Pep Pàmies
Chief Editor, Nature Biomedical Engineering
Larissa Suzuki
Technical Director (Office of the CTO), Google
Pep Pàmies leads the editorial team of Nature Biomedical Engineering, a journal that he launched in 2017. He is a champion of the applied biomedical sciences, handling and writing content particularly on machine learning for biomedicine, medical imaging, gene and cell therapies, and diagnostics. Previously, Pep conducted research in computational soft matter and biophysics at Columbia University in New York City, at the Max Planck Institute in Potsdam, and at the Atomic and Molecular Physics Institute in Amsterdam.
Larissa Suzuki is a Technical Director in the Office of the CTO at Google, a Visiting Scientist at Nasa/JPL and an Honorary Associate Professor of University College London.
As a trailblazer in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, she has engineered solutions that span across realms — from space science, healthcare, and finance to smart cities, federated computations, Internet of Everything, and robotics. She is Google AI Principles Ethics Fellow and Pioneer, contributing to ethical AI practices.
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Sony Group Corporation is a creative entertainment company with a solid foundation of technology. Sony's Purpose is to fill the world with emotion through the power of creativity and technology.
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Nature is dedicated to publishing outstanding advances across all areas of research and engineering. Nature is committed to promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in research communication and publishing, and recognizes the pressing need to recognize and reward women for their contributions.