Karen Petrie

Areas of Specialization: Constraints Programming, Artifical Intelligence
Karen Elizabeth Jefferson Petrie was born in the UK. She is currently Reader in the Department of Computing in the School of Science and Engineering at the University of Dundee in Scotland, as well as Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching of the same School.

Petrie has stated that she first learned to program computers on a Commodore 64 when she was eight years old. Petrie received her bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2001 from the University of St Andrews, and her PhD in artificial intelligence in 2004 from the University of Huddersfield. She wrote her dissertation on the topic of Constraint Programming.

Following her doctorate, Petrie held a variety of post-doc positions, including Intern at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the US, Research Associate at the University of St. Andrews, and Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.

In 2009, Petrie joined the staff of the University of Dundee. She is best known for the “Petrie Multiplier,” which is a measure of the frequency of sexist behavior in a social network as a function of the percentage of females present in the network.

Petrie has authored or co-authored some 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.

Academic Website

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