Change the world

Paula KotzĂ©’s career started in 1979 as Junior Lecturer at the North-West University (then known as the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education) whilst studying towards an honours degree in Computer Science. This followed on the completion of a BSc majoring in computer science and industrial and personnel psychology and a higher education diploma. In 1981 she moved to Pretoria to take up a position as Lecturer at the University of South Africa, whilst completing her MSc at the North-West University in 1983. Her MSc dissertation, titled The Psychology of Computer Programming with Special Reference to Systems and Application Programmers, combined the fields of her undergraduate majors, effectively marking the inception of the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) in South Africa. She was promoted to the position of Senior Lecturer in 1985. During 1992 she spent a year as visiting research fellow at the University of York in the United Kingdom. This period allowed her the opportunity to work alongside some of the biggest names in HCI today. Near the end of the period, she was invited to enrol for a PhD at York under supervision of the Head of the HCI Group, Prof Michael Harrison, which she completed part-time whilst returning to her academic position in South Africa. She was awarded the PhD in Computer Science (Human-Computer interaction) in September 1997, based on her thesis titled The Use of Formal Models in the Design of Interactive Authoring Support Environments. After her promotion to full professor in 1999, she became Head of Department of Computer Science and Information Systems and Director of the Centre for Software Engineering at Unisa. In 2004, she became the first Director of the School of Computing at Unisa. In 2008 she decided to leave management and academia and return to research on a full-time basis by accepting a position as principal researcher and research group leader at the African Advanced Institute for Information and Communication Technology (Meraka Institute) of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). In August 2009 she became the first female Chief Researcher at the CSIR and the Meraka Institute. She retired from the CSIR in March 2018. She currently holds two honorary positions: Extraordinary Professor at the Department of Informatics at the University of Pretoria and as Adjunct Professor in the School of ICT at Nelson Mandela University. 
  
During her academic career she was instrumental in establishing the field of HCI as academic discipline in South Africa and internationally. She played a leading role in many national and international organisations in pursuit of this objective.  Amongst others, she was Chair of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 13.1 (HCI Education and the HCI Curriculum) between 2005 and 2010. In 2006 she was also elected as Vice-President At Large of the Association for Computing (ACM) Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction (SIGCHI), the first non-USA and non-European person to be elected to such a high position in the organisation. She was re-elected for a second three-year term in June 2009. She is currently Vice-Chair of IFIP Technical Committee 13 on HCI, and was Program Chair for their flagship conference, INTERACT, in 2009 and Conference Chair in 2013. 
 
When moving to the CSIR, she widened her scope of research to include socio-technical systems and organisational issues. The main focus of her work included domain modelling with work completed in the domains of e-health, small and medium enterprises, smart environments, WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) and organisational and systems interoperability. In the e-health domain the publication of the South African Health Normative Standards Framework for Interoperability in EHealth, developed by her and her team at the CSIR, as National Policy in April 2013, is generally lauded as the turning point in moving the South African healthcare information systems sector into the 21st century. During her period at the CSIR, she also worked with a number of leading academics and researchers to establish the fields of enterprise architecture and enterprise systems engineering as academic and research disciplines in South Africa.
 
She also played a leading role in research societies in South Africa. She was President of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists (SAICSIT) for two terms (2001-2003 and 2003 – 2004), Vice-President from 2010 -2012, and Council Member from 2012-2016. During her two terms as President she transformed the annual conference of SAICSIT into a conference with an international standing, with papers published on an international digital library (ACM). She also organised and chaired/hosted four SAICSIT Conferences (2001, 2002, 2004, 2010). She serves on the Editorial Board of the South African Computer Journal and was co-editor for the Journal from 2007 – 2014.
 
Capacity building and development of young (and not so young) researchers were very close to her heart throughout her career. Not only has she made an impact on the minds and development of many young students during her teaching career, she was, and still is, passionate about supervising doctoral and master students and mentoring young researchers. She supervised/mentored a large number of masters and doctoral students who are now leading academics and researchers or who have made their own mark in industry, both nationally and internationally. She has published in excess of 100 scientific articles with these individuals and as a single author.
Paula is the past recipient of many national and international awards. Amongst others, she received the IFIP Silver Core award for her service and contribution to the development of the ICT field in 2007. In 2015 she received the IFIP TC13 Pioneer Award in recognition of active participation in IFIP Technical Committees or related IFIP groups, and outstanding contributions to the educational, theoretical, technical, commercial or professional aspects of analysis, design, construction, evaluation and use of interactive systems. She received a Career Achievement Award from the CSIR in 2016. Paula is an Elected Member of the European Academy of Science. She is a National Research Foundation (NRF) B rated (internationally acclaimed) researcher.