The Society for Technical Communication honored local resident and UCF graduate Dan Voss at its annual conference.
Voss, a senior proposal specialist with Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, received the prestigious President’s Award at the opening ceremony of the 60th annual international conference of the STC in Atlanta. The award recognizes distinguished service to the profession of technical communication and the 5,000-member international society.
Voss graduated UCF with a masters degree in English and Education in 1974. He and his wife Maria, supplemented by the Lockheed Martin matching program, actively support two student scholarship programs at the university. Voss is a 25-year member of the Orlando Central Florida STC chapter, an STC Fellow, and an adjunct instructor for Webster University in Orlando.
“It was extremely gratifying to receive this honor, because it provided a strong vote of confidence from STC leadership on the STC student outreach initiative I have worked so hard to promote over the past three years, along with my incomparable mentees from the University of Central Florida, Sarah Baca and Bethany Bowles,” Dan said. “Without their support, there is no way we could have achieved all we did.”
As manager of the local STC chapter’s education committee since the mid-90s, Voss has worked to sustain and nurture a close partnership between professionals in the chapter and technical communication students at UCF. In 2003, he and his first mentee at UCF, Bonnie Spivey, established a formal professional-to-student mentoring program between the chapter and the Future Technical Communicators student organization at UCF—a program that is still flourishing in its 10th year.
In 2009, using the Orlando program as a model, he guided his trans-Atlantic virtual mentee Clio Fouque at the University of Paris, along with Ray Gallon, president of the STC France chapter, as they established a mentoring program pairing professionals in the STC France chapter with students from the University of Paris.
A 35-year veteran in the aerospace industry with Lockheed Martin and heritage Martin Marietta, Voss has worked on scores of successful competitive proposal teams that have landed contracts with a total value in excess of $10 billion. He led two proposal and marketing communication teams that earned the corporation’s top honor for communication, the Comet Award, and its top recognition for excellence in performance, the Nova Award. In 1997, he was named Missiles and Fire Control’s Author-of-the-Year after co-authoring the textbook Ethics in Technical Communication: Shades of Gray with Lori Allen. He was the only non-engineer to receive that recognition in the 40-year history of the award.
Voss has also co-authored and authored numerous articles for professional journals and publications, and has presented and conducted workshops at more than 30 local, regional, and international conferences.
Voss’s interest in student outreach initiatives and student mentoring programs reflects his experience as an educator/trainer. Originally a high school journalism and English teacher, since joining Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) Voss has developed and taught 15 communication-related courses in the company’s in-service education program. He has also taught evening classes at UCF, Valencia and Brevard community colleges, Florida Southern, and Rollins at Patrick Air Force Base.