2020 Winners and Nominees
We have the pleasure of announcing the 2020 winners of the Cathy Lester IT Excellence Award and the Rising Star Award.
About the Winners
IT Excellence Award
The Cathy Lester IT Excellence Award recognizes people with an enduring track record for excellence. For 2020, two individuals received the award:
- Gus Castellanos, Principal Software Developer Analyst, eBITS. Gus’s true passion at work is making things better… Gus consistently goes out of his way to help our department and takes his time to understand the needs we have that are not currently being met… Gus has never shied away from the challenge. When he was first brought on to work on this integration, he learned our payroll processes and the HRIS codes quickly and since then has helped us figure out several complex issues… His excellence in problem solving and process enhancement means he has been the primary developer or support analyst for some of our most critical and complicated integrations… He also values standards and is often the one reminding the rest of the team about best practices we should adhere to… Gus is never afraid to ask the question that everyone else is too embarrassed to ask… Boldness like this is underrated… it makes Gus an excellent role model for other developers and analysts, especially those early in their careers, seeking to find the balance between appearing knowledgeable and capable with clients while also posing the important questions that elicit critical requirements.
- David Voegtle, Information Technology Manager, University Development Office. David follows best practices at all time and makes sure his team does as well. He encourages code reviews and is very thorough when tagged as a reviewer… He pushes for improvements and debates the pros and cons of every single change made to the system. There is no doubt that he wants the very best for our department because he is constantly vocalizing it.… He has great relationships with all our clients. He sees the big picture and can help make decisions on what is best for any app that is being discussed… He was extremely helpful to me when I started my position at the Development office. I could ask him to help me with any task and he would make time to work with me until I felt comfortable… He also helps the business owners. David has endless knowledge about our system. He knows all the business rules. He knows when and why we have made changes in the past… He is a great mentor and manager.
Rising Star Award
The Cathy Lester Rising Star award recognizes someone early in their IT career who shows extraordinary promise. For 2020, Michael Mayo has been selected to receive this award.
Michael delivers quality-oriented development work, and continually looks for innovative ways to improve the customer experience. He provides excellent customer service by listening carefully to client requests and ensuring they get what they need. He is also a regular presenter at our team meetings. He dedicates extra time to helping the Software Developer Trainees in both eBITS and AIS learn new and exciting Python skills. He has a natural inclination for experimenting and figuring things out on his own, especially for web-related tools, and has demonstrated the ability to quickly learn enough of any given technology to adopt it as tool he can use to solve one of our business needs. Michael’s interests and knowledge are both broad and deep. When he focuses on an area, he dives deeply into it and learns it thoroughly. Michael is not only receptive to feedback but actively solicits it. He willingly takes on tasks outside his comfort zone, such serving in the Technical Lead role for Tax Portal Phase 2, where he oversaw a team of three senior developers and completed desired functionality on time, with a tight deadline.
About the IT Excellence Award Nominees
We would also like to congratulate the other outstanding IT professionals who were nominated for this year’s IT Excellence award. Below are some excerpts from their nominations.
- Laura Bowman: Laura is an excellent team player and always gets the job done. She mentors other team members so that they come up to speed in many areas of VIP… She works very well with the business clients and makes sure that the results are accomplished with the highest quality standards… Laura is a wonderful teacher and mentor… Laura is extremely thoughtful. She takes her time with decisions and doesn’t commit to a solution until it becomes apparent that it’s the best option.
- Marjorie Foley: Marjorie works hard to make work easier for her team as well as help the department leadership understand the implications of their asks… Marjorie also has been working hard to implement industry standards… This emphasis on effective use of time and resources means that she also encourages her team to keep learning about new technologies.
- Matt Jorgenson: Matt has a way of making every developer, Junior and Senior, feel confident in their skills and abilities. He was endlessly generous with his time and energy in teaching and sharing information… He dives in and finds ways to not only fix what is wrong, but to enhance and bring the existing project up to the next level of quality… Matt is one of the fastest and most productive developers we have. His easygoing demeanor and tenacious pursuit of technical solutions make him a project manager’s dream.
- Felipe Lee: Felipe is a high-quality, high impact developer who is not afraid to drop into a project or technology that he is not familiar with, and then quickly ramp up and make contributions. He thinks at a systems level, and engages beyond the scope of the tasks at hand in order to improve the overall system quality as well as our capabilities, all while keeping in mind the diversity of user populations that consume those systems… Felipe always makes himself available and he is always willing to help out analysts in our department or across campus.
- Andrew Russell: Drew is the go-to guy whenever there is an issue within the extremely complex and difficult area of identity management… Drew works really hard to ensure the team’s success as well as the success of his peers as individuals. He is truly a person who wants to see his team and teammates succeed. He provides mentorship and support in all aspects of his technical role and beyond.
- Angela Rodriguez-Mayers: Angela, with over 20 years of experience in financial aid, is our team’s lynchpin and rock for keeping this critical business area running smoothly… She’s amazingly calm and positive despite chronically having a huge volume of work that most developers would find quite stressful. Yet she never turns down more assignments… Both the business users in OSFA and her colleagues in AIS lean on her tremendously to understand what should be run and when to run it.
About the Rising Star Award Nominees
We would also like to congratulate the other outstanding IT professionals who were nominated for this year’s Rising Star award. Below are some excerpts from their nominations.
- Evan Fuhr – Evan’s role on the transition to a successor to UTLogin cannot be understated. He has a deep technical knowledge of SAML as well as the software chosen to enable SAML in Enterprise Authentication, Shibboleth. Part of what makes Evan a good mentor and leader on the team is the way in which he encourages his teammates to seek knowledge. What sets Evan apart is his ability to share his institutional and technical knowledge with others. During a period of high turnover on the IAM team, Evan took on a leadership role in disseminating knowledge and found ways to reach each team member in ways that were most helpful for each person. Evan was our biggest technical contributor to Enterprise Authentication. He has helped us stay as close to best practices for Shibboleth and SAML while also helping to create solutions that address UT Austin’s particular use cases (such as creating 2FA flows that can be set in many different ways that allow customers, the authentication team, and ISO, to have control over how 2FA can be enforced).
- Rachel Peace – Rachel has worked hard to learn advanced python while maintaining her skills in natural and webagent. She’s never hesitated to take on any task no matter the complexity. She does so with a positive demeanor and a can-do attitude. She knows when to ask questions and when to take on challenge independently. Rachel came up to speed very quickly learning all the applications in VIP and very quickly started contributing to the application development efforts for the Gift system, Endowment system, Biographical system and much more. One of the outstanding characteristics of Rachel is that she constantly tries to improve the processes within our team by bringing discussion topics to Retrospective agile ceremonies so that the team can reflect on these processes and improve them. Rachel helps her teammates whenever they need help and serves the University well. Rachel runs the peer group and is actively talking to colleagues across campus. She has pushed for more cross-campus participation in community building and skill development.
- Rebekah Post – Rebekah has brought together management, Texas Extended Campus (TEC) accounting, business users, IT, and the student-facing staff to create a dashboard of numbers management uses to monitor and make decisions on the future of TEC using Tableau. She won an award for TEC for collaboration after working at TEC for less than 8 months. She quickly learned a unique, complex software application (Experience Engine) created by a 3rdparty vendor using Ruby on Rails, react.js, AWS, Docker and PostgreSQL database. Rebekah was able to make coding changes and analyze errors within weeks of installing this on her computer. Rebekah has documented her work and held walk-thrus on her work with Experience Engine and Tableau. The documentation is well thought out, easy to read, and easy to find. Rebekah is always willing to learn anything new, share what she has learned, and help others with questions or explanations.
Please join us in congratulating Gus, David, Michael, and all the talented and worthy nominees, on these very high honors! Sincere thanks to all those who took the time to nominate and support IT excellence at UT.