Dr Sheila Garfield is an Academic Tutor and a Research Assistant in the Faculty of Computer Science. She graduated with a BSc (Hons) in Computing from the University of Sunderland in 2000 and received her PhD, from the same university in 2004, for a programme of work connected with hybrid intelligent systems and spoken language processing. In her PhD she collaborated with British Telecom and suggested a novel hybrid system for call routing. This system was developed using an object-oriented development environment (PDP++), using C++ and Perl scripts for various algorithmic implementations and pre/post-processing techniques within a Unix environment.