Sonya Coleman joined the Computer Science Research Institute and School of Computing and Intelligent Systems in 2002 and was appointed Head of the Research Graduate School in 2012. Sonya is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and teaches at undergraduate level. Sonya received a BSc(Hons) in Mathematics, Statistics and Computing (first class) from the Ulster University, UK in 1999, and a PhD in Mathematics from the Ulster University, UK in 2003. She is Cognitive Robotics team leader within the Intelligent Systems Research Centre.  Sonya has publications primarily in image processing, robotics, computational intelligence and financial engineering. Her research has been supported by funding from various sources such as EPSRC, The Nuffield Foundation, The Leverhulme Trust and the European Commission. In 2009 she was awarded the Distinguished Research Fellowship by the Ulster University in recognition of her contribution research and she is currently secretary of the Irish Pattern Recognition and Classification Society.