About the recipients

In recent years, Michael has established himself as one of the UT developer community’s most valuable and helpful members by regularly going beyond his job description to contribute to projects and teams across the portfolio. He has provided technical leadership in the rewrite of the Directory application; the development of a custom application on behalf of the Bureau of Economic Geology; and in his participation with working groups to best apply the benefits of AI and LLMs to the student experience—just to name a few.

Alicia joined the ETS HR team with a primary focus on Natural development, and in a relatively short period, she gained significant experience with the Workday integration toolset. Her ability to learn a new toolset while simultaneously expanding her knowledge in the HR business space has been impressive.

She readily offers guidance to newer team members (those in both more senior and more junior titles). She is a reliable and detail-oriented developer, able to juggle numerous tasks at once and meet deadlines. She prepares in advance for client meetings by familiarizing herself with business rules so she can be prepared to answer their questions. She also proactively creates a list of questions for the clients. Alicia communicates complex business rules well to our campus business users and has established trust with our regular business clients.

Doug Addison, Natalie Hensley, Brandon Hazlett, Shelley Powers, Diana Yu Schofield​

And those who were nominated for this year’s Rising Star award.  

Addison Ashworth, Juni Kim​

Excerpts from their nominations:

Doug Addison​:

He regularly exhibits one of the more challenging but foundational elements to learning and discovery: he communicates not only what he knows but what he doesn’t know, a model act that gives team members the permission to embrace learning and discovery. And though his work supporting administrative systems is a degree removed from the educational mission of the University, it is clear to me that he views his work as keeping the lights on, as it were, to attract the best students to the University and to facilitate learning in the classroom.

Natalie Hensley​: 

Natalie [took] on a significant role with the eBITS Education Team and the Software Developer Training Program (SDTP). Supervising trainees wasn’t something Natalie had done before, but she volunteered to step in, and soon was spending 50% of her time on the Education Team, and doing more than just supervising trainees, including handling a majority, if not all, of our applicant-facing communications, phone interview process, and direct Education Coordinator supervisory and administrative tasks.

Brandon Hazlett​: 

Brandon displays excellence in his technical skills, teaching skills, and ability to motivate others to excel. His skillset in the areas of routing/switching/Wi-Fi are excellent. I know he has personally designed the Wi-Fi for multiple UT buildings. He is patient and does a great job to share his skill in enterprise networking.

Shelley Powers:

Shelley doesn’t just bring solutions into eBITS; she also returns solutions to the UT ecosystem at large. When encountering issues in CMP or noticing lapses of service on servers, she makes an effort to communicate this up the chain to those who may benefit from it. Shelley is often the first to respond when a team member asks for help or clarification, and she does so with thoroughness and thoughtfulness. When she’s made a mistake or needs help herself, she says so clearly and often in a self-deprecating way that puts others at ease, and shows by example how to ‘take your ego out of the code’ and focus instead on solving the problem at hand and achieving the highest-quality result.

Diana Yu Schofield​: 

Diana has been directly involved in critical campus initiatives such as the implementation of Benefitfocus, implementation of Academic Blue insurance options stewardship for graduate students, implementation of a new benefit plan for retirees (UT Care), the Academic Calendar Alignment project (i.e. Lift and Shift), and implementation of a pilot program with Equifax to improve I-9 compliance. These are all examples of campus-wide efforts to advance various University goals and Diana is always involved because she has the technical knowledge, business expertise, commitment to quality, and ability to deliver successful solutions.

Addison Ashworth: 

Addison is deeply committed to the mission of the libraries … He views his work as a way to give back to the academic community and contribute to the Libraries’ vision of leadership in information sharing. Addison’s work as part of the application development team creates the platform that allow the Libraries staff to manage the information and share them portals that is accessible by people of diverse background and belief.

Juni Kim​: 

Juni continues to build great working relationships with other UT developers as well as business clients, demonstrating a desire to understand and improve the business processes of their areas. They regularly engage with business clients in areas other than their own to help resolve larger scope issues and answer questions… Despite being early in their career, Juni is known as a go-to resource for interpreting some of the more convoluted transaction histories in DEFINE. Their ability to make sense of accounting data is on par with not only much more senior developers, but also their clients who have actual careers in accounting.

Please join us in congratulating Michael, Alicia 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.