Staff Profile

Professor Sue Black
An award winning Computer Scientist, Technology Evangelist and Digital Skills Expert, Professor Sue Black was awarded an OBE for “services to technology” in the 2016 Queen’s New Year’s Honours list. She is Professor of Computer Science and Technology Evangelist in the Department of Computer Science at Durham University, a UK government advisor, thought leader, Trustee at Comic Relief, social entrepreneur, writer and public speaker. Sue set up the UK’s first online network for women in tech BCSWomen in 1998 and led the campaign to save Bletchley Park. Sue’s first book Saving Bletchley Park details the social media campaign she led to save Bletchley Park from 2008-2011, it has been an Amazon UK bestseller.
Sue didn’t have a traditional start to her career. She left home and school at 16, married at 20 and had 3 children by the age of 23. A single parent at 25 she went to university, gained a degree in computing then a PhD in software engineering. Sue now has 4 children and 3 grandchildren.
Twitter: @Dr_Black
Research Groups
Department of Computer Science
- Innovative Computing
Selected Publications
Journal Article
- Al-Subaihin, Afnan, Sarro, Federica, Black, Sue & Capra, Licia (2019). Empirical comparison of text-based mobile apps similarity measurement techniques. Empirical Software Engineering 24(6): 3290-3315.
Conference Paper
- Al-Subaihin, A. A., Sarro, F., Black, S., Capra, L., Harman, M., Jia, Y. & Zhang, Y. (2016), Clustering Mobile Apps Based on Mined Textual Features, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement 10th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement - ESEM '16. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, 38.