Yasmeen Ahmad Software Engineer of the Year 2008

Yasmeen has already won a number of awards, including the BCS prize for top Honours student at Dundee University (24 September 2008), which she won jointly with Suzanne Prior. Yasmeen’s project crossed two disciplines – Computing and Life Sciences, and the project was supervised by Andy Cobley and Pete Gregor at the School of Computing and Angus Lamond at the College of Life Sciences.

Yasmeen has now returned to Angus Lamond’s lab where as an honours student she originally carried out her award-winning project. Currently a full-time PhD student she plans to continue and expand the winning project, which involves the  development and use of computational and database tools for the  analysis and management of proteomics data.

Peter Gregor, head of the school of Computing said, “I was at the dinner and presentation, as one of her supervisors and it made me very proud indeed to hear the awards announced. It boosts the reputation of Dundee enormously as one of the best places in the UK to study Computing for one of our graduates to win this award. The presentation took place in front of 400 people, most of them leading employers in the Scottish software sector, and all clocking Dundee as a source of the next generation of software engineers.”

On the cross-disciplinary nature of Yasmeen’s research Prof. Gregor said, “It’s typical of the kind of real world project you are likely to be able to do at Dundee in the Honours year.”

Every Scottish university is invited to enter their best Computing Honours project report. Winners are judged by a panel of leaders in the software industry, with prizes sponsored by leading software companies (the first prize is sponsored by Sopra Group).