Dr. Rebecca Parsons

Dr. Rebecca Parsons

CTO

Dr. Rebecca Parsons is the chief technology officer at Thoughtworks and she has more experience than she cares to admit across a range of industries and systems. Rebecca’s technical experience includes leading the creation of large-scale distributed applications and the integration of disparate systems. Separate from her passion for deep technology, she is a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion in the technology industry. Committed to increasing the number of women in coding and STEM fields, she has served on the board of CodeChix and acted as an advisor to Women Who Code, and is a member of the Board of Trustees for AnitaB.org. Rebecca was also chairwoman on the Agile Alliance Board of Directors for four years and served the organization over a total of six years.

Dr. Parsons is a frequent speaker at industry events including Collision Conference, Web Summit, YOW!, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and more.

Before joiningThoughtWorks, she was 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.

In 2018 Rebecca was honored to receive the prestigious Technical Leadership Abie Award, presented by AnitaB.org, celebrating a woman who led or developed a product, process, or innovation that made a notable impact on business or society.

Dr. Parsons received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Economics from Bradley University, a Master’s of Science in Computer Science from Rice University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.  She has also co-authored “Domain-Specific Languages,” “The ThoughtWorks Anthology,” and “Building Evolutionary Architectures.”

You can follow Rebecca on Twitter: @rebeccaparsons

Check out this video about Dr. Rebecca Parsons, along with her speech at the GHC 18 Opening Keynote and her GHC 18 session.

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