Taking EMC into the 21st Century

The EMC Society's new president shares his thoughts on standards development, education, membership recruitment, and other key concerns.

Q. What are the most critical issues the IEEE EMC Society needs to address in 2000?

A. One is globalization. Over the past couple of years there has been a big push in the organization and the EMC Society to act more globally and increase worldwide membership. I hope to continue that trend by stepping up our presence at EMC symposia around the world. It's important that we pursue memorandums of understanding--written agreements that outline our society's degree of involvement with EMC conferences and exhibitions--to get the IEEE name out there worldwide. Depending on the particular symposium, we might do a technical paper review, set up a booth for membership recruitment, or agree to swap current symposia records with other EMC event organizers. And we would certainly lend our name so that the various EMC events can use the IEEE logo on their advertisements to get more people to attend.

We're also moving some of our board-of-directors meetings outside the United States--a practice started a couple of years ago under then-president Dan Hoolihan, which I hope to continue. We're scheduling these meetings worldwide, preferably in concert with symposia or conferences on EMC, to demonstrate that we are not a strictly U.S.-based entity.

Q. What do you see as the society's role in helping electronics engineers develop EMC-compliant products?

A. Standards development is an important area for us. We're concerned with measurement standards and are constantly casting about for those that fill a need in industry. The work done by our standards committee often finds its way into international standards. That which starts out as a voluntary standard to demonstrate and quantify how to measure something often becomes input to a regulatory agency in Europe.

Education is also a big issue. Although there are a few colleges that offer EMC training, most do not. So we do an important job of institutionalizing EMC training at each of our annual symposia with a daylong EMC workshop organized by our Education Committee. We also have a university grant program. Every year we solicit applications worldwide, and the grant is seed money for the creation of EMC courses. We've awarded several grants already.

Q. Speaking of education, how do you plan to bridge the gap between the academic focus of the EMC Society and real-world practical applications?

A. We have a strong industry presence and involvement already, so ours is not a society strictly focused on academics. In that sense I think we're probably in better shape than a lot of the societies in IEEE. I was struck by that notion at my first IEEE Technical Activities Board (TAB) meeting--a quarterly assembly comprised of the presidents of all the IEEE societies. We were going around the room introducing ourselves when I realized that of the representatives of the 36 societies, about two-thirds were from academia. For this reason, IEEE has raised its relevance to industry as an issue it has to address.

But bridging the gap doesn't seem to be a problem for the EMC Society. A couple of people on our board are in academia, so we cultivate our industry-academia contacts. By providing seed money to schools to start EMC courses, we create a need for professors who can teach them. I think we're keeping industry and academia together and helping the universities flourish. Our annual EMC Symposium is the perfect example of industry and academia networking to get what they need, from test equipment, consulting, and materials to basic education and the latest research.

Q. What can we look forward to at this year's symposium, which is scheduled to take place in Washington, DC, August 21­25?

A. In celebration of the year 2000, the IEEE is commissioning Millennium Service Medals. Each society will award these medals to a number of its distinguished living members from any generation. The number of medals a society will award depends on its population. Seventeen EMC Society members, chosen by an ad hoc committee, will receive medals for their significant technical, administrative, or service-oriented contributions to the world of EMC at a luncheon to be held during the symposium.

Q. The fact that the EMC Society recognizes its members for their accomplishments must be attractive to potential members. How do you propose to increase society participation and grow the membership?

A. We need to get more people involved at the local, grassroots level. We have close to 40 chapters around the world, and we'd like the people who attend monthly meetings to get more involved in the society, the board of directors, and so forth. In recent years we've been holding our board-of-directors meetings in cities where we have chapters, and I hope to keep doing this. We invite the chapter members to our meetings or provide local speakers so people will come and meet us.

As we move around the world, I hope more people will say they'd like to be more involved. If after reading this interview somebody from the society was to call me up and ask, "Is there any capacity in which I could serve on the board as a committee chair or something like that?" the answer would be, absolutely, yes. We need people to help us. Any area that you're interested in, we need the assistance worldwide.

We're in an interesting situation when it comes to membership recruitment. It costs $15 per year to belong to the EMC Society, but it costs upwards of $100 to belong to the IEEE organization. Now, I could probably convince a lot of people to pay $15 to join the EMC Society. What makes membership a tougher sell is telling those people that their bill is going to be closer to $120, because they have to join IEEE before they can join the EMC Society. Particularly in some third-world countries and other areas outside the United States, membership fees present a real obstacle for people. IEEE has already identified this as a worldwide issue to be addressed. I'd like to follow up on what the organization is doing and maybe come up with some of our own initiatives. We have already started dividing up our membership committee to focus on different regions of the world.

Finally, I'd like to see more young engineers and more female engineers joining us. We're working on a survey that will help us assess what we need to do to attract younger people. I don't have a clear strategy on how to attract more female engineers, because EMC is a fairly niche market and the population of female EMC engineers is probably not very large. But I have noticed that many of the women who attend EMC trade events tend to be younger, so perhaps figuring out how to appeal to younger engineers will help us attract more female engineers in the process. IEEE has recently coined the term GOLD (Graduates of the Last Decade) to signify the people it is working hard to recruit. IEEE wants GOLD members.

Joe Butler can be e-mailed at jbutler@parker.com. For information about the IEEE EMC Society, go on-line at http://www.emcs.org.