Spotlight: Congratulations to our 2023 Employee Award Winners!

At the end of January, we invited our employees to nominate their peers for the 2023 Employee Awards. The Innovation, Integrity, and Most Valuable Consultant award categories had many peer nominations – all deserving and all very appreciated! Rising Star and Brightest Light awards are selected by ILW Leadership. We are proud to present this year’s Employee Award nominees and winners! Be sure to scroll down to check out the winner spotlights!

Most Valuable Consultant

• Dan Harner
• Doug Mooney
• Emi Ford
• Heather Puffenbarger
• James Tucker
• Jeff Blakley
• Jenny Finneran
• Justyn Berlinski
• Kevin Parks
• Kristen Workman
• Srini Anand
• Swami Krishnan

The commitment of our employees is what propels us forward in a fast-paced and ever-evolving technological landscape. Behind every success story, there is a journey marked by challenges, late nights, and a relentless pursuit of improvement. Our award winners have navigated this journey with resilience and determination, turning obstacles into stepping stones towards success. Their achievements are a testament to the extraordinary potential that lies within our organization.

We would also like to express our gratitude to every member of our Team. Each team member contributes to the vibrant tapestry that is our workplace culture. Together, we create an environment that fosters growth, collaboration, and shared success.

Brian Connolly

Brian is a brilliant, physics PhD-turned data scientist with exceptional creativity and an innovation mindset. From implementing novel rules-based and AI-driven NLP approaches and complex machine learning models for our Odin-FM and AFSC projects to putting forward novel solutioning ideas for proposals, Brian’s ingenious problem-solving talent is inspiring and sets a new standard for creative thinking. Brian’s innovation mindset extends beyond data science and into the data engineering space. Brian has incubated an ingenious method to generate complex data taxonomies by extracting knowledge from SQL query statements. This is a novel way to automatically derive knowledge graphs over established database systems, which can be scaled across any industry or organization looking to gain insights from their data.

Justyn Berlinski

Justyn is an outstanding data engineer, has contributed to several of our core engineering solutions, and has a talent for making unusable data usable. This year Justyn implemented multiple creative data engineering solutions for our commercial clients. He was instrumental in creating a preliminary design of an XML discovery and extraction tool. His early research required innovative thinking to discover schema and data content lineage, which enabled the creation of a metadata-driven design to explore, tag, and extract data from complex XML structures. Justyn also used an innovation mindset to ingest Google Analytics in a framework structure to enable an upgrade with minimum effort between versions. In addition, Justyn collaborates internally across project teams through knowledge sharing and recently took the initiative to create a Databricks sandbox with a scripted class to provide his data engineering and data science peers a self-learning platform for our Innovation Lab.

Jeff Blakley

Jeff is an exceptional leader and a talented data engineer that leads by example. He holds his personal integrity and the integrity of ILW as the gold standard in everything he does. Over the last year, Jeff led the establishment of the ILW Data Engineering Practice, which has enhanced technical collaboration across projects in our remote work environment. Jeff works diligently to foster a culture of trust and transparency with his peers, his clients, and members of the ILW management team. He has a strong moral compass and expresses his perspectives and views with complete honesty and openness, always taking the high road. Jeff’s character, dedication, and commitment make a significant contribution to creating a workplace of culture that fosters trust and respect.

Dan Harner

Dan is a tremendously skilled and versatile developer who delivers superb project work, playing an instrumental role in the successful delivery of robust capabilities to our Air Force and Navy clients. Dan is always a pleasure to work with, brings a positive spirit to project teams, and is willing to dive into modern technologies to bring forward novel approaches for making technical solutions more scalable such as leveraging Python and NPM package registries. With substantial experience building end-to-end solutions, Dan is the go-to consultant for system design and process automation. Dan consistently demonstrates his commitment to excellence, to his team members, and to the success of the company. He is greatly appreciated, and we are proud to have him as part of our ILW family!

Ryan Aposhian

Ryan has been with ILW for a little over a year and continues to shine with his team on the IS4 project. He has been given several challenging projects in the Cloud and DevOps spaces and his risen to the occasion. Ryan was able to add value by correcting inaccuracies and misconfigurations on the path to moving a program of systems to the Cloud. Ryan has been given progressively more challenging tasks to work on and has tackled each with integrity and tenacity and in doing so has demonstrated a dedicated and innovative approach to solving problems. Ryan exemplifies the core values that drive our culture forward and has a bright future in technology and with ILW!

Swami Krishnan

Swami brings positive energy and enthusiasm to all that he does! He always thinks creatively and brings forward innovative ideas. His passion for innovation and enjoyment for his data science art shines through and is highly contagious. Swami is very thorough and does a fantastic job with paying attention to details, leading to outstanding work for his clients. A client has even asked that Swami stay as an advisor indefinitely. In addition, Swami is always willing to support data science practice activities, support proposals, and gracefully mentor and encourage others. We appreciate Swami’s enthusiasm and passion for his craft and his willingness to share it with others!

Award Criteria

• Innovation Award: Awarded to the employee who has demonstrated the best example of innovation over the past year. Qualities include thinking outside the box, being willing to take a calculated risk, to not necessarily accept the status quo, and who has had the best ideas this year.
• Integrity Award: Awarded to the employee who has demonstrated strong character and integrity this year. Qualities include doing the right thing, even when it is hard, as well as being able to admit and take responsibility for mistakes and demonstrate a consistency between words and actions.
• Most Valuable Consultant Award: Awarded to the employee who consistently gets things done and is the best at what they do. This is a peer who is so upbeat that they can make even the most difficult projects fun and whose peers would choose them first to work with on a project or other internal effort.
• Rising Star Award: Awarded to the employee who, in the eyes of Illumination Works’ senior leadership has shown the greatest improvement in key areas of their job and their contributions to the ongoing goals of the company over the past year. 
• Brightest Light Award: Awarded to that individual, team or partner within the Illumination Works’ family that best exemplify our core values: being the best at what we do, hold ourselves accountable, are open minded, are committed, do what we say we will do, focus on our customers, and be confident decision makers.  

About Illumination Works

Illumination Works is a trusted technology partner in user-centric digital transformation, delivering impactful business results to clients through a wide range of services including big data information frameworks, data science, data visualization, and application/cloud development, all while focusing the approach on the end-user perspective. Established in 2006, ILW has primary offices in Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio, as well as physical operations in Utah and the National Capital Region. In 2020, Illumination Works adopted a hybrid work model and currently has employees in 15+ states and is actively recruiting.