Sandra Feliciano won the 2021 Standards+Innovation Technical Body Officer Awards

Nominations for this award came from the CEN and CENELEC national members and represent success stories of combining innovation and standardization from all over Europe.

This year’s winner, out of the five proposed nominees, is Sandra Feliciano, nominated by IPQ, the Portuguese National Standardization Body. She is a lecturer at Porto Polytechnic and a researcher at the Knowledge Innovation Centre, and she has been building bridges between the worlds of academia and standardization for over a decade. During this period, she has actively participated in national, European, and international standardization and taken on several leadership roles.

She is currently Convenor of ISO TC 232/WG 8 Educational Organizations Auditing Practices Group and of Joint ISO/CASCO - ISO/TC232 WG 58, which is developing ISO TS 21030 Requirements for bodies providing audit and certification of educational organizations management systems. In CEN, she is a delegated expert at TC 353 Information Technology for Learning, Education and Training since 2009.

Sandra strongly promoted the interaction between the technical bodies and the R&I community supporting the adoption of deliverables developed by several research projects as new work item proposals in the technical bodies’ work programmes. These Innovation transfers resulted in the development of new standards (NP 4512:2012 and IWA 35:2020) and others are under development including ISO TS 21030.

Sandra Feliciano commented on this achievement: “To transform ideas into sustainable innovation, Academia needs the support of sturdy processes and systems. Standardization and the other dimensions of quality infrastructures provide just that. Initiatives such as the CEN-CENELEC Standards+Innovation Awards are a great contribution to boost stakeholders’ awareness to the matter. It also serves as a call to action for policy makers: If the adequate funding instruments are created, many more initiatives to bridge the worlds of Academia and Standardization could be launched.”