Women in Engineering: Katina Michael Featured Person of the Month
Katina Michael is the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. With two short stints at OTIS Elevator Company and Andersen Consulting, Katina was offered and exciting graduate engineering position at Nortel in 1996. In this role, Katina consulted to some of Asia’s largest telecommunication operators and service providers in China, Taiwan, Singapore, India, and the Philippines, among others. She also had several opportunities to be on secondment in North America which opened her horizons to the way that information and communication technologies would impact consumers and businesses in the future.
In 2002, Katina was offered a lectureship at the University of Wollongong, and decided to leave her network and systems solutions team to complete a Doctorate in Philosophy. Katina had been fascinated by automatic identification technologies since her years in high school, and was awarded her PhD in 2003 in the field of innovation. She credits her teaching and research success to the practical exposure she received during her years at Nortel in a variety of roles- strategic (pre-sales/geodemographic market demand), technical (network engineering/ dimensioning), and financial (business case/planning).
At the University of Wollongong, Katina has taught subjects as diverse as corporate networks to business process management, innovation in information technology, and organizational issues. More recently, Katina was integral in introducing an innovative major in social policy into the Bachelor of Information Technology. In 2009, she completed a Masters of Transnational Crime Prevention in the Faculty of Law which has aided her to begin researching legal and regulatory issues, changes to national security, cybercrime, and ensuing social implications.
Katina has written over 100 peer reviewed papers and five books, among which is a co-authored 500 page volume on the social implications of automatic identification technologies and location-based services. The guest-editor of eight special issues on a variety of themes to do with new and emerging technologies such as radio-frequency identification (Proceedings of the IEEE) and the social implications of national security (Prometheus). Katina is passionate about the way information and communication technologies are impacting the way we live and work.
Citation: Katina Michael in "Featured Person of the Month", Women in Engineering (WIE) Newsletter, January 2013, p. 7.