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Dr. Steve Atkins is a Past President of a traditional Rotary club, and helped charter a new eClub dedicated to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene: The Rotary E-club of WASH. Steve has long been a Human Resources (HR) lecturer and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and statistical analysis lecturer at Otago Polytechnic of New Zealand. He was also a founding member of the Global Organisation for Humanitarian Work Psychology (which has grown from eight to eight hundred members in its first decade.

Prior to becoming an academic, Steve had a lengthy career in spacecraft launch ops and astronaut performance research. Since becoming and remaining a full-time academic in early 2000, he has authored or co-authored over fifty peer-reviewed research outputs, including in the international journals: Tourism Research, Human Performance, Human Resource Management, Public Personnel Management, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, and Motor Behavior, and in internationally-edited books published by Wiley, Routledge, CABI/Oxford, Palgrave-McMillan, and Springer.

His second career as a research academic is linked to much of his astronaut-research time, via their common focus on rigorous assessment of human capabilities and human-to-systems interactions. His primary research context now is in the self-assessment of human capabilities and expert-rater assessment of talent-requirements for providing near-real-time (NRT) technical support to humanitarian water-aid teams and surface water-quality monitors. The latter has seen his recent return to the spacecraft-based Earth Observation (EO) research arena, as regards ground-truthing samples for EO of surface water qualities.

For much of his life, Steve’s been a surface-swimmer and commuter-bicyclist. His oft-repeated question, urged by PDG Karen Purdue: “If you’re not a Rotarian, well, why not?”