Prof. Hart gained a 1st Class Honours Degree in Chemistry from the University of Oxford, followed by an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD, also from the University of Edinburgh, explored the use of immunology as an inspiration for computing, examining a range of techniques applied to optimization and data classification problems.
She moved to Edinburgh Napier University in 2000 as a lecturer, and was promoted to a Chair in 2008 in Natural Computation. She is active world-wide in the field of Evolutionary Computation, for example as General Chair of PPSN 2016, and as a Track Chair at GECCO for several years. She has given keynotes at EURO 2016 and UKCI 2015, as well as invited talks and tutorials at many Universities and international conferences. She is Editor-in-Chief of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press) from January 2016 and an elected member of the ACM SIGEVO Executive Board. She is also a member of the UK Operations Research Society Research Panel.
