Dr. Rebecca Parsons

The Technical Leadership Abie Award is our most prestigious award and celebrates a woman who led or developed a product, process, or innovation that made a notable impact on business or society. This year’s winner is Dr. Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks’ Chief Technology Officer.

For decades, Rebecca has used her knowledge and technical experience in applications development across a range of industries and systems. She has led the creation of large-scale distributed object applications and the integration of disparate systems. Furthermore, Rebecca is a strong advocate for diversity in the technology industry. Committed to increasing the number of women in coding and STEM fields, Rebecca served on the board of CodeChix and acted as an advisor to Women Who Code.

Rebecca received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Economics from Bradley University, a master’s degree in Computer Science from Rice University, and her doctorate degree in Computer Science from Rice University. She is also the co-author of “Domain-Specific Languages,” “The ThoughtWorks Anthology,” and “Building Evolutionary Architectures.”

Rebecca is a sought after speaker for industry events, serving as a featured presenter at well-known conferences, including Collision Conference, Web Summit, YOW!, the Grace Hopper Celebration, and more. She held the position of chairwoman for four years on the Agile Alliance Board of Directors, and has served the organization over a total of six years.

Before coming to ThoughtWorks, Rebecca worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida where she taught courses in compilers, program optimization, distributed computation, programming languages, theory of computation, machine learning and computational biology. She also worked as a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory researching issues in parallel and distributed computation, genetic algorithms, computational biology, and nonlinear dynamical systems.

You can follow Rebecca on Twitter: @rebeccaparsons

Thank you to Intel for sponsoring the 2018 Technical Leadership Abie Award.