Katina Michael Receives Brian M. O’Connell Distinguished Service Award

By on August 10th, 2017 in News and Notes, Societal Impact

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine Editor-in-Chief Katina Michael has been recognized with SSIT’s highest award for service with the Brian M. O’Connell Distinguished Service Award. The award was presented Thursday evening August 10 at ISTAS 2017, in Sydney, Australia, by SSIT Past-President Greg Adamson.

Michael has served as Editor of T&S Magazine since 2012. During her tenure the size of the publication has increased dramatically, and the content has continued to develop into a rich mix of scholarly refereed content, and excellent shorter articles accessible to a general audience.

Over the same period, T&S Magazine’s “impact factor,” a rough measure of the influence and frequency of citation of the publication, has doubled. In 2016, IEEE Technology& Society Magazine received the Society for Technical Communications Award of Distinction for Editorial Excellence, under Michael’s leadership.

Michael is Professor in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia. In addition to her work on T&S Magazine, she has chaired two ISTAS conferences, in Australia and Toronto, and run countless other conferences and workshops. Since 2014, she has concurrently been a senior editor of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine. During her tenure as EIC for T&S she has also been the special issue guest editor on SSIT topics for Computer, Electronic Commerce Research, IEEE Potentials, Proceedings of the IEEE and a forthcoming issue of IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine.

Narelle Clark, deputy CEO of the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) noted on Twitter at the time of the ceremony, “Wow. @katinamichael gets an award from @IEEESSIT and talks about the person after whom it is named. Brilliant.” Brian M. O’Connell was a past SSIT president who made great contributions to the work of the society who died in 2008 at the age of 47.

Katina was lost for words for a change. She thanked everyone for the opportunities she had been given, the Managing Editor and Past Presidents and Past Editors for mentoring her closely for a decade. She extended her thanks by individually identifying delegates who had contributed to the Magazine over the years and was grateful for all that she had learnt in the process.

“It was very emotional,” Michael said. “I was thinking that Brian could have still been here with us now, and then Paul [Cunningham, SSIT President] said ‘but he is here, just his body is not.’”