Valerie Aurora

Valerie Anita Aurora is a software engineer and feminist activist. She was the co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization that sought to increase women's participation in the free culture movement, open source technology, and open source culture. Aurora is also known within the Linux community for advocating new developments in filesystems in Linux, including ChunkFS and the Union file system. Her birth name was Val Henson, but she changed it shortly before 2009, choosing her middle name after the computer scientist Anita Borg. In 2012, Aurora, and Ada Initiative co-founder Mary Gardiner, were named two of the most influential people in computer security by SC Magazine. In 2013, she won the O'Reilly Open Source Award.