User:SeoR/sandbox/Karlin Lillington

Karlin J. Lillington is a Canadian-born Irish technology and business journalist, notable for her work with The Irish Times, The Guardian, Wired, Salon.com, Red Herring, and multiple other newspapers, magazines and online publishers. She holds a doctorate from Trinity College Dublin, has been a member of the board of Ireland's public service broadcaster, Raidió Teilifís Éireann, and is a long-serving member of the advisory board of Dublin's Science Gallery.

Early life and education
Lillington was born in Canada, and moved to California at an early age. Her father, Glen (1926-2011), a Canadian of partial Icelandic heritage from Winnipeg, was a pulmonologist and worked for many years at Stanford University and UC Davis. Her mother, Ellen (nee Place), married Glen in 1957, and they settled in California in 1960, moving to Menlo Park on his retirement. Karlin was one of three children, the others being boys.

Lillington studied at UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara. She took a degree in literature, and later pursued, for about a decade, a PhD in Anglo-Irish literature, with a significant focus on the poetry of Seamus Heaney. She hosted Heaney on a visit he made to California in the early 1990s. She visited Ireland to pursue postgraduate studies in Anglo-Irish literature. She published and defended her thesis, Gender and metaphor in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, at Trinity College Dublin in 1995.

Career
Lillington worked at San Jose State University while pursuing her PhD, and it was during these studies that she secured her first e-mail account and pre-World Wide Web Internet access, and her interest in matters of technology partly sprang from this. Having worked in student journalism at UC Santa Barbara, including having been editor of The Daily Nexus student paper, she began to work in professional journalism while waiting to defend her thesis.

Her work for The Irish Times goes back to at least 1996, and for The Guardian to at least 1997, and she has written regularly for both, having been the Irish Times' technology correspondent. She has also written for Wired, New Scientist, Salon.com, Red Herring, the Sunday Business Post, the Sunday Times and many other outlets. She has written one-off pieces which bring together her literary studies and technology, such as a speculation around James Joyce and hypertext. She has been a speaker at many conferences and summer schools, including the Government of Ireland's invitation-only Digital Summit and the MacGill Summer School. She has also appeared on BBC and RTE radio, and on television with RTE and TV3. She produced her own series of podcasts, technoculture, including interviews with Chris Horn and Prof. Anthony Dunne, and has participated in other podcasts, such as a memorial for Mary Mulvihill with Róisín Ingle. Lillington has raised a number of privacy concerns, especially around social media, and also online platform nuisance issues, and left LinkedIn over the latter.

Voluntary and public service roles
Lillington is a long-serving member of the Leonardo Group, the advisory board of Dublin's Science Gallery. She has also served a term on the board of Ireland's public service broadcaster, Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ).

Recognition
Lillington was awarded the Outstanding Achievement Award at the UCD Smurfit School Business Journalist Awards in 2019.

Personal life
Lillington lives in Dublin, and in 2018, after over 30 years of full or partial residence, became an Irish citizen, writing an account of her citizenship ceremony for the Irish Times. Jointly with Chris Horn she has been a senior sponsor of the Irish National Opera since its launch year. Her portrait on her personal website, and on Twitter, is a thermal scan of her head by 11 Unisys cameras. She has written and managed a specialist site for King Charles Spaniels.