By Antonio Luque, VP Membership

The main goal of the Membership Activities (MA) team is to provide our members with a community where they feel welcome and where they can network, interact and collaborate with others who share their technical or professional interests. Our vision is that students, young technologists, senior employees or entrepreneurs, academics, and retired workers can find what they need in IES.

For that reason we have restructured the MA team to be able to respond to the changing needs of our technical community. The revamped Chapters and Joint Chapters Committee, together with the Chapters Vitality and their team of regional coordinators will help our Chapters to fulfill the local needs of our members everywhere. Kim Fung Tsang and Gabor Sziebig are coordinating this area.

A new team is the Students Activities Committee, led by Ala Chalghaf, which has created a network of student ambassadors that are able to help students all over the world to make the most of their IES membership.

We are appointing a new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion team because we feel that these three values are very important to IES, to IEEE, and to humanity as well. We want to make sure that everybody feels welcome and Lucia Lo Bello is our DEI coordinator. At the same time we are empowering the Women in Industrial Electronics team, led by Ya-Jun Pan, to help reduce the gender gap and allow all members to participate regardless of the gender with which they identify.

Of course we continue improving our support to Young Professionals, coordinated by Dmitri Vinnikov, by providing support to travel to conferences to present their work, and by supporting events organized for and by YPs to boost their careers.

Finally, IES is a Society open to changes and to adapt to new environments. Our members want us to try new things and we are happy to invest in the future of our communities. That’s why we have a New Initiatives team, chaired by Marina Indri, which is looking for opportunities and proposing novel programs to support our members and showcase the opportunities that IES provides to potential members.

All these wonderful volunteers and myself are looking forward to hearing from you and learn the ways in which the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society can be your professional home and be even more beneficial for your professional career, continuous education, learning needs, and for your technical communities. Do not hesitate to contact the MA team at vp-membership@ieee-ies.org and ma@ieee-ies.org.

To learn more about the IES Membership Activities, visit: https://www.ieee-ies.org/membership