Lena (Eleni) Stergatou Receives Inaugural WordCamp Europe Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship

Lena (Eleni) Stergatou has been awarded the first-ever WordCamp Europe Kim Parsell Memorial Scholarship. This prestigious scholarship, previously exclusive to WordCamp US, was recently extended to include WordCamp Asia and Europe following the latest meeting of the WordPress Foundation Board.

The scholarship honors Kim Parsell, a beloved member of the WordPress community and regarded as one of the first “women of WordPress.” Affectionately referred to as #wpmom, Kim was a passionate WordPress contributor and advocate for women in technology.

In their announcement, the WordPress Foundation stated, “Lena’s dedication to WordPress translations, core, plugins, and more truly embodies the values that Kim held dear.”

Hailing from Greece, Lena is a devoted WordPress and BuddyPress enthusiast. She has been working as a “Code wrangler”, “Happiness Engineer” and translator (in Greek) with WordPress multisite since 2008 and since 2010 with BuddyPress. She currently develops web services for the Greek educational community at the Computer Technology Institute (CTI Diophantus).

Her WordPress profile reads, “I’m familiar with WordPress core and ways to extend it, have an eye for problems on large-scale multisite installation, have fixed numerous outdated themes and edited plugins in order to make them work as they should in multisite WordPress.

I‘m used to answer questions about WordPress usage, write manuals and FAQs (in Greek language). I love to debug, fix broken things, extend functionalities and share them with others.

This love led me to participate in the WordPress and BuddyPress community, by contributing with new plugins, “resurrect” broken plugins, bug fixes and contribute to Greek translations as Locale manager in WordPress Greek team.”

Lena is an active contributor to the WordPress Community, Core, and Polyglots teams.

The scholarship covers travel to the host city, hotel accommodation for the event duration, and a WordCamp ticket. It does not include airport transfers, meals, or other incidental expenses.

WordCamp Europe 2025 will be held from June 5–7 in Basel, Switzerland.