Celebrating the people who exemplify our culture and values
In January, we invited employees across the organization to celebrate excellence by nominating their peers for the Illumination Works (ILW) 2025 Employee Awards. The response was overwhelming, with an impressive number of nominations in every category—each one a testament to the talent, dedication, and impact of our team. The final selections were challenging due to the number of worthy and impactful teammates. We are proud to announce and celebrate the winners of this year’s Employee Awards!
Ben Patrick
Ben’s technical excellence and positive energy are a force multiplier for the projects he supports. A key contributor across initiatives, Ben seamlessly balances multiple efforts while continuously pushing into new, complex, and in-demand technologies such as graph databases and knowledge graphs. On our Theia project, he delivered truly inventive solutions, reimagining how metadata, embeddings, images, and data provenance could coexist in a graph model when no prior blueprint existed―creating work that positions ILW at the forefront of an emerging field. Ben approaches challenges with thoughtfulness and accountability, owning setbacks and acting quickly to resolve them. He is equally impactful in how he shows up for people, supporting teammates during high-pressure deadlines, uplifting others during difficult moments, guiding learning with mentorship, and strengthening collaboration with his humor and engagement. Whether advancing client relationships, contributing to center of excellence discussions, or presenting with clarity and insight, Ben consistently elevates the work and the people around him.
Dan Harner
Dan exemplifies integrity in every sense of the word, consistently doing what is right for ILW, our teams, and our clients, even when it is difficult or unseen. As one of ILW’s most experienced engineers, Dan pairs deep technical expertise with genuine humility, creating an environment where others feel confident sharing ideas and growing alongside him. He holds himself to the highest standards of design, architecture, and delivery, always keeping long-term quality and client impact at the forefront. Dan takes full ownership of his work, accepts responsibility, and approaches challenges with fairness and transparency, which has earned him lasting trust and respect across the organization and with clients. Dan supports numerous high-impact projects simultaneously, remaining reliable, thoughtful, and deeply committed to mentoring others―all with a smile and positivity. His refusal to stop learning, even as a seasoned leader, reflects his unwavering commitment to excellence. Over the years, Dan’s integrity has been a steady compass for ILW.
Lillian Thistlethwaite
Lillian exemplifies what it means to be an innovation leader at ILW. She brings a creative mindset to every challenge, translating complex, ambiguous problems into practical, high-impact solutions. Across projects, she demonstrates innovation of solution, approach, and explanation—combining proven methods with fresh ideas and a willingness to experiment, learn, and adapt. Lillian has made a lasting impact on our Raven and Odin-RMF projects, applying her deep expertise in NLP and data science to some of our most technically demanding work. On our Raven project, she introduced novel approaches to extracting and interpreting complex Excel tables, significantly improving classification accuracy, explainability, and user trust. On our Odin-RMF project, her proactive experimentation drove control assessment accuracy to an impressive 96%, strengthening the project’s reliability and value. Lillian was recently appointed as the NLP Center of Excellence Lead, where she provides technical direction across NLP and GenAI initiatives and supports solution development that aligns advanced methods with real-world use cases. Beyond her technical contributions, Lillian inspires those around her, sharing knowledge, supporting teammates, and fostering a culture of continuous learning. Her blend of creativity, rigor, and execution makes her a true catalyst for innovation across ILW.
Grace Brown
Grace truly embodies what it means to be a Rising Star at ILW. In every project she touches, Grace demonstrates technical excellence, initiative, enthusiasm, dependability, and a continuous improvement mindset. She consistently owns her work even in high-pressure moments, supports teammates whenever help is needed, and demonstrates humility by acknowledging knowledge gaps and quickly returning with well-researched solutions. Grace’s technical impact is remarkable, including dramatically improving entity detection accuracy scores from single digits to 70–90% and playing a key role in advancing our Odin-DR project. Her curiosity and creativity shine through her contributions to the Computer Vision Center of Excellence, Early Professionals Group, and Employee Engagement initiatives, as well as her technical presentations to various ILW communities. Grace has the rare ability to make complex problems look effortless in her data science domain while also continuously growing her data engineering, software development, and database expertise leading her to be a multidisciplinary professional. Highly collaborative, enthusiastic, and always eager to learn, Grace elevates both the work and the people around her, making her an outstanding Rising Star.
Erica Swanson
Erica demonstrates open-mindedness, accountability, commitment, and reliability in everything she does. Her outstanding contributions to our Data Analytics as a Service project have consistently delivered meaningful value to clients, including uncovering insights in time series and spectral data that had been currently unknown. Erica’s deep expertise, paired with exceptional listening skills, allows her to educate and partner with customers in a way that builds trust and confidence. She sparks creativity and innovation by actively engaging peers in conversations around product usability and the motivations of end users. Beyond client delivery, she has had a lasting impact on ILW through mentorship, onboarding support, internship leadership, authorship of a widely used AI/ML Best Practices document, and playing a key role in the development of a successful proposal under a compressed timeline. Throughout every challenge, Erica brings positivity, composure, and accountability. She is a natural leader who elevates those around her, consistently demonstrating dedication to her team, her clients, and ILW’s mission.
Brett Elkins
Brett exemplifies the spirit of the Brightest Light Award through his consistent demonstration of ILW’s core values and his exceptional impact across the organization. As an experienced technology leader, he is driven to be the best at what he does, combining strategic vision with disciplined execution to deliver results that are tightly aligned with business and customer priorities. Brett holds himself and others accountable, doing what he says he will do and following through with confidence and integrity. From the inception of the PIC Fusion project, Brett has shown unwavering commitment and confident decision-making, providing clear architectural leadership to modernize legacy data pipelines through cloud technologies—driving measurable operational efficiencies and cost reductions. His open-minded approach and continuous investment in learning allow him to operate fluently across diverse technology ecosystems and stay at the forefront of emerging solutions. Equally important, Brett is a trusted and approachable leader who fosters open communication, collaboration, and trust, guiding teams through complex technical and programmatic challenges with a positive attitude. His focus on customers, commitment to excellence, and ability to lead with clarity make him a shining example of the values that define Illumination Works.
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, the Illumination Works headquarters is in Beavercreek, Ohio. In 2020, Illumination Works adopted a hybrid work model and currently has employees in 20+ states and is actively recruiting.
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