Mandy Chessell

Amanda Elizabeth Chessell is a computer scientist, a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, an IBM Master Inventor and a Member of the IBM Academy of Technology, and the first woman to be awarded the Silver Medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She studied at Plymouth Polytechnic until 1987, obtaining a bachelor's honours degree in Computing with Informatics, and joined IBM in 1987 at its Hursley laboratory near Winchester, later completing a master's degree in software engineering at the University of Brighton in 1997. Her early work focused on distributed transaction processing, adding features to products such as CICS, Encina, Component Broker and WebSphere Application Server; later she developed model-driven tools to simplify the analysis and design of large systems, and then data lake architectures, metadata management and information governance, chairing the ODPi Technical Steering Committee and leading the ODPi Egeria project. In 2001 she won the Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal for the invention and engineering of Reusable Software Component Architecture, and in 2002 she was elected a Fellow of the Academy.