Dame Stephanie Shirley

Dame Stephanie Shirley CH DBE
Dame Stephanie Shirley, 2013
Born	Vera Buchthal (1933-09-16) 16 September 1933 (age 83) Dortmund, Germany
Known for	Philanthropy and founding the IT company, FI Group (now part of Sopra Steria)
Website	steveshirley.com
Medical career
Profession	Businesswoman
Institutions	FI Group (Sopra/Steria) Chair The Shirley Foundation
Specialism	Autism

Dame Vera Stephanie "Steve" Shirley CH DBE FREng FBCS (née Buchthal; born 16 September 1933) is a British information technology pioneer, businesswoman and philanthropist.

Shirley was born as Vera Buchthal to a Jewish father, a judge in Dortmund who lost his post to the Nazi regime, and a non-Jewish Viennese mother. In July 1939, at the age of five, Shirley arrived, together with her nine-year-old sister Renate, to Britain as a Kindertransport child refugee. She was placed in the care of foster parents living in the Midlands town of Sutton Coldfield. She was later re-united with her biological parents, but said she "never really bonded with them".

After attending a convent school, she moved to Oswestry, near the Welsh border, where she attended the Oswestry Girls' High School. In order to study mathematics which was not taught at the school, she received permission after assessment to take lessons at the local boys school. She would later recall that, after her Kindertransport and wartime experiences, "in Oswestry I had six wonderful years of peace".

After leaving school, Shirley decided not to go to university (botany was the "only science then available to my gender") but sought employment in a mathematics/technical environment. At the age of 18, she became a British citizen and changed her name to Stephanie Brook.

In the 1950s, Stephanie worked at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill, building computers from scratch and writing code in machine language. She took evening classes for six years to obtain an honours degree in mathematics. In 1959, she moved to CDL Ltd, designers of the ICT 1301 computer.