About

I am a Reader of Computing Education in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.

I've had an interest in education for a long time, and am increasingly focussing my research in this area. I'm particularly interested in access to education and how certain groups - especially women and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds - can be excluded and marginalised in STEM and CS.

I do research in this area and I also do a lot around national policy, for example through the BCS Scottish Computing Education Committee, which I currently chair, the RSE's Learned Society Group, on which I represent the BCS, and the BCS Academy. I'm the Outreach Coordinator for Infomatics and am passionate about encouraging young people to engage with CS. And of course my interests and research inform my teaching philosophy and my approach to the courses that I run and the students that I supervise.

I've also spent a lot of my career working in data integration and matching and in Semantic Web technology. I'm interested in how heterogenous data from multiple sources can be dynamically discovered, integrated and interpreted, especially in Crisis Management situations. I'm involved in the wonderful ISCRAM community and in the Scottish Linked Data Community, and I co-chair the Heriot-Watt/UoE Semantic Web Lab (SWeL). I'm also interested in multi-lingual and multi-domain matching and in developing lexical resources, and have been doing work around Gaelic WordNets.

I'm always interested in taking on engaged students in any of these areas, and can sometimes find funding. I also love collaborative research and working with a wide variety of people. Get in touch if you're interested!

I live in Edinburgh with my husband, two children and dog, and I travel as much as I can.

Fiona McNeill FBCS SFHEA MYAS