Please join us in congratulating our Illumination Works 2024 Employee Award winners!
At the end of January, we invited our employees to nominate their peers for the 2024 Employee Awards. Each award category had many nominations – all deserving and all very appreciated! We are proud to present this year’s Employee Award winners!
Kristen Workman
Kristen’s strong work ethic and positive energy are contagious, inspiring those around her and elevating her project teams. As a Software Developer, Kristen has been instrumental in the success of multiple SBIR innovations with UI/UX components, including ADCAT, Odin-DR, Odin-AMDA, Linnea, and Theia. As a thoughtful front-end developer, she consistently prioritizes the end-user experience and takes the lead in developing and maintaining UI standards and best practices across the company. By implementing reusable UI/UX development approaches, she enhances scalability across projects. Kristen is a great communicator, does an outstanding job presenting UI demos to customers, and welcomes newer consultants by passing on a lot of great tips. Over the past year, she has expanded her impact, serving as an ILW manager and intern mentor as well as a technical mentor for students working on a college capstone project. Kristen is an outstanding team member, leading by example and making a significant contribution to driving the company’s progress.
Julie Good
Julie is passionately committed to excellence and consistently exemplifies the highest standards of integrity in every aspect of her work, setting a benchmark for others to aspire to. As Proposal Coordinator, Julie expertly manages a variety of tasks, each with its own set of challenges and tight deadlines. She coordinates complex and competitive proposals with exceptional skill, while always demonstrating deep respect for the values we hold dear as an organization. Her ability to collaborate effectively with multiple teams and partners, while maintaining a professional and positive attitude, is a testament to her strong integrity, work ethic and dedication. Julie approaches every situation with a steadfast commitment to doing what is right, rather than what is easy. Her openness, communication, and honesty promote a culture of trust and respect within our team and across all partners. Beyond her role in proposal coordination, Julie is also an active member of the Employee Engagement Team, where she contributes to fostering and nurturing our workplace culture to strengthen our team and promote a sense of shared purpose across the organization.
Grace Jimenez
Grace is an exceptionally talented Data Scientist, showing a deep passion in all her work and consistently delivering impactful results. Grace played a key role in the computer vision aspect of our Theia data labeling and curation solution, demonstrating an exceptional ability to push the boundaries of image analysis. She approaches challenges with a unique blend of creativity and technical expertise, drawing from a wide range of research and practical examples. By combining different methodologies and techniques, Grace develops innovative solutions that are instrumental in driving our team forward. Her enthusiasm and positive attitude are contagious, making her a valuable team member who fosters collaboration and encourages others to share ideas freely. Grace’s dedication to continuous learning and improvement keeps her at the forefront of her field, and her contributions have been instrumental to furthering our work in computer vision. Grace is also an engaged member of the ILW Data Science Practice, where she shares her technical knowledge with the team and actively contributes to practice activities.
Doug Mooney
Doug is an exceptionally talented and highly skilled Principal Data Scientist. His innovative mindset, attention to detail, and commitment to delivering high-quality results make him an invaluable asset to any team. Doug’s contributions to our Linnea part printability recommendation system have been nothing short of groundbreaking, consistently pushing the boundaries and taking us into uncharted territory. His innovative approach has brought fresh perspectives and new ideas, transforming our work in computer vision-based feature extraction and machine learning classification. Beyond his technical prowess, Doug has the ability to communicate complex concepts in a way that makes them accessible to both technical and non-technical audiences. His involvement in presenting and demonstrating our solutions to potential customers has been invaluable. Whether working independently or collaborating with others, Doug continuously brings forward-thinking ideas and solutions that drive progress. Doug also serves as a senior leader and active member of the ILW Data Science Practice, where he enthusiastically shares his knowledge with others and spearheads practice initiatives.
Emi Ford
Emi consistently brings a positive and enthusiastic attitude, uplifting those around her and fostering a collaborative team environment. She is always willing to go above and beyond and takes the initiative to explore and leverage every available resource to enhance her work. Emi is an outstanding team player and has been an integral part of our Theia and Linnea teams. She actively implements cutting-edge computer vision technologies, such as deep learning-based object detection, and she seeks out valuable datasets like 3D imaging, to drive innovation and improve outcomes. Emi’s contributions extend beyond technical work—she has played a key role in multiple proposals, demonstrating her strategic thinking and commitment to the team’s success. Emi is also an active member of the ILW Data Science Practice, where she shares her expertise with the ILW data science community and contributes to practice initiatives. Emi is also a member of the ILW Employee Engagement Team, through which she recently took on the role of Onboarding Cohort Mentor to help ensure our newest ILW team members are integrated and connected within the ILW community.
Samantha Dunseith
Samantha consistently showcases outstanding expertise, dedication, and leadership in overseeing complex contracts for both our Government and Commercial Divisions. As our Contracts Manager, she has been instrumental in optimizing and streamlining contract processes, enhancing efficiency across the organization. Beyond her core responsibilities, Samantha has taken on greater accountability in negotiating key agreements, ensuring regulatory compliance across an expanding portfolio of projects, and fostering strong, long-term relationships with clients and stakeholders. Her strategic approach and attention to detail have been vital in mitigating risks, driving successful contract execution, and supporting the company’s sustained growth.
John Tribble
John brings positivity to everything he does, inspiring those around him and leaving a lasting impact through his dedication, innovation, and leadership. As a Principal Data Scientist and senior leader in the ILW Data Science Practice, John is a natural problem-solver, offering insightful guidance, creative solutions, and fresh ideas that drive progress. He excels at bringing people together, fostering collaboration, and spearheading initiatives that lead to bigger and better outcomes. His deep technical knowledge and outstanding interpersonal skills enable him to connect the right people and spark innovation among his peers. John fosters strong, long-lasting relationships with our clients, earning their trust and respect for ILW. He has a remarkable ability to present with passion, enthusiasm, and energy, captivating his audience. Additionally, John excels at thinking quickly on his feet and handling any question with confidence. He brings a strong sense of thought leadership to every facet of the company, taking initiative this year to establish the ILW Computer Vision Center of Excellence while also playing a pivotal role in the successful implementation of our summer internship program. Whether pushing the boundaries of data science innovation, mentoring colleagues, or driving meaningful change, John shines brightly in every endeavor.
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.