Dr Irina Brass wins 2019 BSI Standards Makers Award

Dr Irina Brass of the PETRAS Standards, Governance and Policy Stream won the 2019 BSI Standards Makers Award – Education about standardisation!

The BSI Standards Makers Awards are the most prestigious awards BSI gives to standards-makers and were created to recognize new members, industry leaders, consumer champions, international standards-makers, creativity, committee management and leadership.

The following originally appeared in UCL Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy news

Dr Brass received the award in recognition of her exceptional contribution in integrating standards and standardisation into the higher education curriculum and for promoting student education projects and research around standards. The winners were announced on Thursday 21 November at the Standards Conference and Awards event in London.

On receiving the award, Dr Brass said: “We live in a world of standards, but their presence and value is not fully appreciated. Over the past ten years, my research has focused on the role that standards play in supporting not just economic growth and innovation, but also regulatory frameworks and policy-making, especially around emerging technologies. The complex and often misunderstood dynamics between standards and regulations are highly relevant today, as our societies have entered the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

“In this disruptive world, standards and standards-making processes need to be better captured in academic curricula: from design, to management studies, to law, policy making and politics. The unique, research-led approach to teaching we adopt in our Masters of Public Administration (MPA) at UCL STEaPP has helped integrate my interest about the dynamics between standards and regulations into teaching practice, and to work closely with BSI to promote learning about standards and standards-making processes.”

Dr Brass has a background in public policy, regulation and standardisation, with research that spans across cybersecurity and safety regulations, data protection, intellectual property and competition rules. She is the Programme Co-Lead of the MPA in Digital Technologies and Policy at UCL STEaPP and works closely with policy makers and the standards development community on governance frameworks for managing cybersecurity and data protection in the Internet of Things (IoT). In 2017, Dr Brass was appointed Chair of the IoT-1 Technical Committee of the BSI.

Her current research focuses on the economic and social regulation of disruptive technologies, particularly digital technologies and biotechnology, and the establishment of more dynamic and adaptive modes of governing these innovations. She was  a Co-Investigator of the Standards, Governance and Policy Stream of the PETRAS IoT Research Hub, and is a Co-Investigator of the Future Targeted Healthcare Manufacturing Hub looking at new regulatory approaches for targeted healthcare.

Running since 2014, the BSI Standards Makers Awards exist to recognise exceptional contributions to standards making and are the highest form of recognition for BSI standards-makers.