Gitte Christensen

Gitte graduated as Cand. Scient. Biology with Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry in 1981. Her thesis was on building a model of carbon flux in lakes. Although access to computer resources was very restricted in those days, most of the computations and statistical analysis was done on a programmable Texas pocket calculator (2K memory) and the rest on computer cycles donated by a postgraduate student who didn’t manage to use up his granted amount before year-end.

After graduating she found that positions in environmental biology was very scarce and, after several temporary positions teaching biology at high schools, she came across a course with the title “Re-educating long term unemployed academics to EDP”. She was accepted, and the final topic of the course was APL. After Fortran and Cobol, APL was a revelation; it made her wonder why APL was not made available to students of science!

After the course, Gitte was offered a position at one of the leading APL vendors of the day, I.P.Sharp Associates , and she never looked back. During her career in APL she has taught APL, developed applications, and been involved with project management in a wide variety of business areas, particularly financial analysis and managing development of commercial software. She has always focussed on delivering software that allows each user to utilise the computer to the best of their ability.

Since joining Dyalog as Managing Director in 2005, Gitte has moved into a managerial role. Much to her regret, she no longer works directly with APL except when the spreadsheets don’t facilitate the analysis she requires.