Mary Sheeran has been a functional programming enthusiast for nearly 40 years, at Oxford University, Glasgow University and now Chalmers University of Technology, where she has been a full professor since 1999. She was designing and using a functional hardware description language before there were hardware description languages, and she contributed to the development of SAT-based methods for verifying hardware. She has been a supervisor to a great bunch of doctoral students too.

This has all entailed working mostly with men. A couple of years ago, her university asked its staff "how would you like to change Chalmers?" and the answer was obvious to her: increase gender equality, aiming for excellence. The resulting proposal was funded to the tune of about 30 million euros and work on the Genie initiative began last January, with Mary as co-leader.