This series of six weekly webinars is held on Tuesday evenings, 5:00 - 6:00 pm, from 20 January - 24 February 2026 for students in Year 12 (S5 in Scotland/Year 13 in Northern Ireland).
These sessions are completely free and open to prospective students who would like to learn more about different topics in Computer Science. They are led by female and non-binary members of the Department and explore a topic of the presenter’s choice.
The sessions are run as a Zoom webinar and designed to be interactive. Throughout the seminars, you are asked to answer questions, complete quick quizzes and have the opportunity to ask questions.
Before signing up, please read our Code of Conduct for online events.
To sign up for the seminar series, please fill in this form. You will receive an email containing the link to the webinar a few days before it is due to take place.
If you’d like to be considered for the Women in Computer Science programme, for female and non-binary students in Year 12, please see this page.
You can find the topics of the seminars below (due to be updated in December 2025):
If you'd like to watch the recordings of seminars from previous years, please see this page.
20 January - TBC
27 January - TBC
3 February - TBC
10 February - TBC
17 February - TBC
24 February - Computational complexity
What makes some problems easy to solve and others seemingly impossible even for the fastest computers? In this talk, we’ll explore how mathematics and computer science meet in the study of computational complexity, a field that asks what can (and cannot) be efficiently computed. We’ll see how simple mathematical ideas like counting, combinatorics, and logic help us classify problems according to their intrinsic difficulty. From the elegant theory of algorithms to the famous P vs NP question, complexity theory reveals a hidden geometry of problems, connecting proofs, puzzles, and computation in surprising ways. Along the way, we’ll discuss how questions about efficiency of algorithms lead to some of the most profound open problems in modern mathematics.
