Ten years ago a group of IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) volunteers were tasked with transitioning the PELS Newsletter into a full-fledged magazine. Membership of the Society had grown and the benefit of such a journal would have a positive impact. The challenge of this endeavor was to first decide how to make this happen considering the developing power electronics industry and the constraints of the IEEE organization. Placing the charge of the magazine in the hands of a volunteer and advertising sales under control of IEEE was the usual path, but the Society would be eventually faced with volunteer burnout and diluted sales activity due to the cur-rent sales organization at the time. With some creative thinking, the PELS volunteers agreed the best long term path was to hire an experienced Editor-in-Charge (EIC) and a crackerjack adverting salesman to sell advertisements for the new magazine to pay for the salary of the EIC. The then PELS President Don Tan and the PELS Executive Director Mike Kelly bought into this plan. Kelly created the new periodical proposal document as per IEEE requirements and followed the process for approval from the IEEE periodicals committee. The periodical title was selected as IEEE Power Electronics Magazine with four issues per year.
