Metis President’s Awards 2013
Every year, Metis recognizes employees who have been instrumental in helping our company achieve the highest possible level of customer service. This year, we salute four employees for their outstanding achievements in technical leadership, innovation and quality:
Technical Leadership Award – Laura Plice
“Laura is recognized for her outstanding leadership of the LADEE Flight Dynamics team.”
As Flight Dynamics team lead on the ARC LADEE mission, Laura has made key contributions to a project that is of critical importance to NASA. She has responded to numerous technical and organizational challenges in managing the LADEE Flight Dynamics efforts that include supporting LADEE launch, phasing loop, orbit determination, attitude and operations planning and analysis. Laura also provided outstanding technical leadership in developing a new trajectory design technique to meet the unique challenges faced by the mission due to the inherent instability associated with LADEEs low altitude and near-equatorial orbit. Our NASA customer has also demonstrated their appreciation of Laura with a NASA Honor Award this year.
Innovation Award 2013 – Edgar Russell
“Edgar is recognized for his innovations in developing the NASA Ocean Color virtual machine project.”
Edgar has been instrumental in innovation for the NASA customer. He was the primary integrator in setting up a Linux-based virtual machine cluster for the Ocean Biology Processing Group at GSFC. The virtual machine cluster provides support services for a substantial data processing and distribution facility for ocean science data. The configuration provides high availability and automated fail-over for internal services using shared disk storage from CORAID. Edgar was able to accomplish this task with open source software, which previously required expensive commercial licenses from VMware or Red Hat. This is a significant feat and opens up VM cluster technology to many groups who could not previously afford it. Our NASA customer has asked him to collaborate on a white paper with CORAID on the implementation of the cluster.
Quality Award – Jose Cortez
“Jose is recognized for his dedication to engineering quality as a member of the NASA SPHERES team.”
Jose has been a key member of the NASA ARC SPHERES team, and has been instrumental in leading critical technical tasks. Most recently, Jose lead the effort to integrate the STELLA software for use on SPHERES. His successful efforts contributed to NASA mission success by ensuring SPHERES readiness for upcoming science experiments. Jose’s STELLA integration work will now be leveraged by other ARC missions and projects. He also contributed to the development of a NASA ARC in-house capability for creating SPHERES battery packs, which resulted in significant cost savings to the NASA customers. Our NASA customer has also demonstrated their appreciation of Jose with a NASA Honor Award this year.
Quality Award – Darryl LeVasseur
“Darryl is recognized for his dedication to engineering quality as a member of the NASA SPHERES team.”
Darryl is leading multiple critical activities as a member of the NASA SPHERES team. As a result of his dedication to engineering quality, Darryl has become the ‘laboratory manager’ for the engineering labs utilized by the SPHERES team. Darryl is also the team’s social media lead, taking responsibility for developing the SPHERES team online presence. In addition, he contributed to the development of a NASA ARC in-house capability for creating SPHERES battery packs, which resulted in significant cost savings to the NASA customers. Our NASA customer has also demonstrated their appreciation of Darryl with a NASA Honor Award this year