Once again it is my pleasure to announce to you the winners of this year’s Cathy Lester IT Excellence Award and the Rising Star Award.
About the Winners
IT Excellence Award – Greg Atkinson, Principal Senior Software Engineer, eBITS
Greg has spent over 25 years dedicated to improving the quality and maintainability of our administrative and financial information systems. [He has a] commitment to maintainable design, a vast knowledge of varied systems, and mentors junior developers into confident programmers capable of holistically approaching any challenge….His knowledge of Centralized Receivables, Fee Billing, Accounting / DEFINE is both broad and deep, but that is only the beginning of Greg’s contributions to any stewardship area or project. Greg is always ready to ask the hard questions. In a world filled with competing priorities and accelerated timelines, Greg always takes the time to slow down and discuss all the possible options. He looks into an unpredictable future and sees the full range of possibility in any technical system, and pushes all of us, from junior developers to management, to understand the technical and financial implications of the design choices we make.
Rising Star Award – Joanna Jackson, Senior Software Developer/Analyst, UT Libraries
Joanna Jackson is a rising star in Libraries IT… She is highly effective and professional in her working habits. She has both identified and created many opportunities to take initiative. She anticipates process and product needs early and spots concrete opportunities to continually improve and move the needle toward excellence… Joanna is a force of positivity and always seeks to include and welcome those around her. She gives unsolicited public shoutouts to both her squad members and to others outside of it. She has helped build a culture of appreciation and clearly embraces the idea that others’ successes reflect well on all of us. This unselfish attitude has earned her the trust of all her colleagues, peers, clients and users. She builds bridges of communication and goodwill wherever she goes and helps us all partner more effectively… Through her efficient work habits, she finds time to actively mentor newer hires, serve on the Library Staff Council, serve on multiple hiring committees, and elevate our IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility) goals… She continually seeks feedback and self-reflects on what it means to do her job better. She doesn’t stop there; it’s as if she’s pre-reflecting on how to do her next two jobs better as well. After our squad lost our most senior member last summer, Joanna saw the need for leadership and stepped seamlessly into it. She guides and manages without the benefit of having official authority to do so. The fact that her peers feel nothing but appreciation for those efforts speaks to how well she does it.
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.
Olga Andreeva, Academic Information Systems: Awarding financial aid to students is a complicated and high profile process that changes each year and it intimidates even those who have been dealing with financial aid for years. Olga jumped right in without hesitation and has done an amazing job at getting all of the changes implemented and deadlines met. We are all so thankful that she has joined the AIS team.
Steven Boren, Dell Medical School: Steven joined Dell Medical School IT team a couple of years ago and…has played a key role in bringing up services like RedCap and making it reliable and available enough to be used for many of our clinical activities. He has had extensive experience in IT at the Population Research group and that experience has been a key ingredient that we needed here. [For my course, Steve] came up with background material as well as hands on activities where our students could see how big data can improve our healthcare systems. Steve went out of his way to provide this. [His] calm demeanor is a great asset at times of great change and uncertainty, and I feel lucky to be able to count on Steve to provide a solid service at the cutting edge of technology.
Laura Bowman, University Development Office: [Laura] has long been responsible for the university’s public-facing giving page, and it is clear from the way she talks about and maintains the page that she holds her work to the highest standard knowing that it is representing UT and serving as an important interface between the university and the public. [She is] a longtime UT employee who possesses a shocking array of business and technical knowledge, who is a fiercely loyal and generous team member who goes above and beyond to help her colleagues, and who has an almost unbelievably deep commitment to creating exceptionally high-quality work.
Carrie Bullock, Academic Information Systems: Carrie is the go-to analyst for all financial aid questions. Her knowledge of all the moving pieces is indispensable when it comes to completing projects in timely manner and producing accurate results. Carrie sees the big picture behind every change or new development we need to do. She has worked countless overtime hours and responded professionally and quickly to user and manager requests. She knows how to test byzantine systems, and she writes solid, effective coding solutions. The last two years have brought unique stressors even if you don’t count the pandemic, and Carrie has come to the rescue of UT Financial Aid many, many times.
Jeanne Cseri-Martin, CIO/ITS COO Office: [I] stand in amazement at the way that Ms. Cseri-Martin helped every member of [our] faculty and IT teams work together to successfully create, test and support the development of [The Virtual Learning Environment], which has greatly enhanced our public health students’ education. [This] was a highly successful project that is helping set the standard for a new innovative way to continue the teaching, learning, and research mission of the university. Her enthusiasm for our project and her support for every team member was unwavering, and her positive, caring spirit, which shines through everything she does, continues to be a personal inspiration to me.
Shubhra Datta, Academic Information Systems: Shubhra is a role model and pace setter for others, quietly leading by example in doing some of the best work being done in our community. [Her] diligent pursuit of excellent service to her stakeholders and the university through automation and information management, and her persistent pursuit of technological change, despite the challenges inherent in our architecture and culture. Without waiting for a sea change, and really only [through] commitment to provide excellent service, she is implementing improvements to our systems and meeting her stakeholders needs, without allowing technology to serve as a limit.
Albert Degollado, Dell Medical School: He is one of those rare IT individuals who has the talent of being able to speak in an understandable way to both stakeholders and his own team members. He seems to easily synthesize the scope of a project and present a viable solution that works for the stakeholder as well as balancing accessibility and University guidelines. He strives to create a web product that meets and exceeds the needs of the patient or end user. Recently, Albert was given a near impossible task of building a website from the ground up within a 90 day period of time. Not only did he meet the deadline, he exceeded our expectations of the final product. We could not have done this project in such a short period of time without his guidance, expertise, infinite patience and collaboration.
Charles Jones, Undergraduate Education: I believe Charles deserves this award because he is an incredible coworker and person. I would call him the best IT person I have ever worked with – and I’ve worked with a lot of great IT people. He is a great example of the best that UT has to offer. When we unexpectedly began remote work in 2020, our College’s technology needs increased exponentially, as online student serves became an absolute necessity and not a luxury. Within only a few days of the work-from-home order, Charles presented a vision to leverage systems that he already built to create a new request system. He continued to improve the system and within another few days we had created an online EID-protected solution for almost every transactional function of our office. It is impossible for me to overstate the impact that this system has had on our business operations, and Charles is completely and fully responsible for its visioning, development, implementation, and ongoing maintenance. He is a superb leader in innovative technology solutions, an excellent communicator, and an invaluable member of the Moody College of Communication Undergraduate Education team.
Remigio (Remi) R Macias Jr., University Development Office: Remi Macias is a dedicated member of the AIS development training team. He brings technical expertise and a unique ability to teach complex objectives to others in a personable and professional manner. Often when campus members are not able to schedule in one of Remi’s training classes, he makes time to reach out and work with them one-on-one. During a difficult 2020, Remi worked tirelessly to integrate and transition his classes to an online forum. Beyond training, he is a true asset to the team, often taking the lead to coordinate special technology projects.
Sheilagh O’Hare, Records and Information Management Services: I think that Sheilagh is very deserving of this award for her extensive knowledge, her mentorship, and her willingness to help all of us. She has helped us to transform our processes over the last few years, both as an office and a college. Sheilagh’s consultation has meant that we not only have replaced our reliance on paper, but we are much more efficient as an organization. We would not have gained the efficiencies at the college level, and been so well prepared for remote work, if not for Sheilagh.
Rich Rutty, Academic Information Systems: I can say that working with Rich over the years has been a delight and he has taught me much, and this is why I nominate him for the Cathy Lester IT Excellence Award. His sharp understanding of the principles of programming, thorough command of Natural, and a solid understanding of relational databases makes him an excellent all-around programmer. I have worked very closely with him for a number of years and never stop being amazed by his adaptability, his technical prowess, and his helpful nature. He is frequently called upon to handle technically challenging projects and is often in the position of brainstorming new, outside the box solutions. I have found him a quick study who was willing to learn and take the reins without hesitation.
Peter Telck, Enterprise Business Information Technology Solutions: It has been a pleasure working with Peter and he continually impresses me with the time he is willing to take and extra steps to come up with insightful solutions to our technical issues. He is readily available to discuss any issues we are having and continues to come up with innovative ideas on how to solve our problems in the most streamlined ways, which speaks to his knowledge of both UT and the Workday system. Additionally, he helped us make a massive change from how we’d set up records at go-live. Without his extensive testing of these scenarios we would not have been able to make this update. Peter went above and beyond.
Raul Villa, Academic Information Systems: Raul has faced many challenges this year and risen to the occasion with grace and professionalism. He joined the Packaging project in AIS just as the pandemic and quarantine conditions were setting in and he became a critical member of the team in a project that involved many, many years of legacy code and months of changing business requirements. Raul put in a lot of extra time in the final weekend, pushing the project to final success. In the fall, Raul became the project lead for the Longhorn Textbook Access project. At the same time, he served as interim team lead for the RAID team in AIS. Raul balanced his responsibilities to the RAID team while also producing solid code, managing communications with multiple external parties. It’s challenging enough to take on the workload that Raul found himself in the last year. It’s another thing entirely to manage that workload effectively, with high quality, and with grace and thoughtfulness to everyone involved. I’m glad I was able to partner with Raul for much of the year, and I hope he receives the recognition he deserves.
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.
Sameera Balay, IQ – Information Quest: Sameera came to IQ as an experienced software engineer and has generously shared her knowledge and skills in all areas of software development to help our team learn and practice modern cloud development and data engineering. She has provided excellent guidance in areas such as QA testing, documentation, data validation and code practice. Early in the pandemic, she took the lead on the campus occupancy project, processing wireless access data to enable a campus heat map that helped Facilities Services adapt its work to the COVID lockdown. She has phenomenal organization skills and is always ready and willing to share her time helping teammates learn new skills and improve our processes.
Ryan Mullowney, Academic Information Services: Over the past year, Ryan has clearly demonstrated his commitment to serve the university and its mission through his extensive work with course schedule, class management, and room scheduling systems to move classes online and otherwise adapt to COVID-19, often under last-minute time pressures with quickly changing requirements… Ryan takes an active role in sharing his knowledge and expertise with others and helping to mentor them. He is one of the coordinators of the INDEX peer and mentor exchange program between AIS and eBITS and has been a challenge analyst in the AIS Software Developer training program. Ryan also understands and appreciates the large scope and impact of the systems he develops and maintains and how important testing and quality assurance are in preventing system outages or data integrity issues. He uses testing checklists, conducts code walkthroughs with colleagues, and conducts thorough quality assurance tests on user interfaces. Ryan is an exceptional member of the university IT community.
Aleksandra (Sasha) Sivolob, Technology Resources: Sasha has been part of the TRecs app/dev team for approximately 3 years now. She came to our department with little software experience and went through our own internal training program. Upon completion she hit the ground running building application, working with databases, and advancing development practices in our department… Another example where Sasha has been tremendous is her drive to implement Jenkins and automated testing in our applications. She steered an effort to move many of our applications to the PyPE 2 environment where control over supporting libraries and processes like Jenkins is more readily accessible. She developed scripts to assist the team with onboarding projects to PyPE 2 and showed our team how to implement the automated tests. When we are in active development, she takes the lead in encouraging her peers to implement tests for work they have completed. She is our go-to resource for testing and it’s because of her own interest in excelling in this space… Sasha is an excellent asset to the University and will only get better with time!
Nikolas Suh, Technology Resources: Nik has been a leading developer since he started working at Technology Resources. He excelled in the training program and then took the knowledge from training in addition to continually doing research to provide excellent products for the Technology Resources Department. Nik was the sole developer on a DocuSign integration application for Capital Planning and Construction. This provides a safer and more streamlined approach to approving capital projects. He also was one of the lead developers on the Parking project which consisted of learning a massive codebase and refactoring it to adhere to present development standards. In addition to providing excellent work when working on projects, he takes the time to help other developers with technical questions and he provides valuable feedback in code reviews. Nik’s positive attitude helps our team function well together.
Sara Tzaperas, Enterprise Business Information Technology Solutions: Since joining our team, Sara has continuously impressed me in all aspects of her work… Right from the start, Sara was willing to jump in and respond to client questions and dig into bug reports. She has a very methodical and data-driven approach for tackling issues, and never hesitates to ask for help when necessary. Due in large part to her strong analytical skills, she picks up new areas quickly and has become the subject matter expert for several key systems we support. Sara is very proficient in her technical duties, and her strengths also include communication, adaptability, and customer service.
Thank you,
Sara Gore, on behalf of the Cathy Lester IT Excellence Committee