Perdita Stevens studied mathematics at King's College, Cambridge, and then
at the University of Warwick, writing a PhD in algebra under Professor J. 
A. Green. She then switched to professional software engineering, working
for three years at BT's Glasgow Software and Systems Engineering Centre. 
Here she became interested in modelling of object oriented design, and in
the relationship between mathematics and software engineering. She returned
to academia in 1994, taking a post as Research Fellow in the Laboratory for
Foundations of Computer Science at Edinburgh. Her research interests have
spanned model checking, legacy systems reengineering and games for software
design; a common thread is that she likes identifying structure in systems
and how it changes. From 2000-2006, she held an EPSRC Advanced Research
Fellowship on <em>Supporting Software Design</em>.

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Currently, she works on mathematical aspects of software modelling and
model-driven development, including foundations of bidirectionality and its
potential role in democratising decisions about the behaviour of software.
She wrote the first textbook on UML, <em>Using UML</em>, which has been
translated into seven languages, and her book <em>How to Write Good
Programs</em> will be published by CUP in 2020. She has sat on over 50
international programme committees and has over 50 publications. She is on
the Editorial Boards of journals including <em>Theoretical Computer
Science</em> and <em>Software and Systems Modeling</em>, and has chaired
conferences including UML (now MODELS), TACAS, FMOODS and FASE, and the
Educators' Symposium at MODELS. She has been instrumental in the
development of the bidirectional transformations community, helping
organise the first Bidirectional Transformations Dagstuhl and cochairing
the Bx 2013 workshop at ETAPS; she was the founding chair of the Bx
steering committee. Her 2007 paper <em>Bidirectional model transformations
in QVT: Semantic issues and open questions</em> was given the 10-year
Most Influential Paper Award at MODELS 2017.

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In her teaching, she is particularly interested in helping students to be
intrinsically motivated life-long learners. 

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She is married (to <a href="http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jcb"">Julian
Bradfield</a>) with a teenage son and enjoys music, especially singing.