Valerie Aurora

Valerie Aurora is an American software engineer and feminist activist who is best known in computing for her work on Linux filesystems and for co-founding the Ada Initiative. In the Linux community she advocated new filesystem developments, including ChunkFS and the Union file system. Her birth name was Val Henson; she changed it shortly before 2009 and chose her middle name in honor of the computer scientist Anita Borg. The Ada Initiative, which she co-founded, was a non-profit organization that sought to increase women's participation in the free-culture movement, open-source technology and open source culture. In 2012 she and co-founder Mary Gardiner were named two of the most influential people in computer security by SC Magazine, and in 2013 she won the O'Reilly Open Source Award. She studied at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.