St Andrews grad named Young Software Engineer of the Year

Malbasic won first prize for a project using sensors to replace complex keyboard sequences with gestures, using the whole surface of a laptop or tablet.

Women swept the board at the Scottish software engineering awards organised by ScotlandIS, the trade body for the digital technologies industry, and were presented at the ScotSoft2017 dinner on 5th October in front of 450 guests from across the industry.

At St Andrews, Malbasic was president of the Computing Society, and set up ‘StacsHack’, a student-organised tech event and hackathon in St Andrews.

She was a founding member of Startup St Andrews, a 52-hour entrepreneurial challenge conducted in collaboration with Bloomberg LP, the Saltire Foundation and the Entrepreneurship Society.

Professor Aaron Quigley, Chair of Human Computer Interaction, who was Malbasic’s supervisor at St Andrews said: “The field of computing needs to achieve gender equality in this generation as the problems we tackle need the skills and talents of everyone.

“Gala and all her classmates represent the face of this generation and we look forward to seeing the achievements of all our alumni.”