Congratulations to the 2020 Rising Stars

Each year, the Rising Star Awards recognize individuals who are early in their federal IT careers yet already are having an outsized impact. The women and men listed below have been selected both for their accomplishments over the past year and for their leadership potential in this community.

These awards are part of our larger Government Innovation Awards program. A joint effort of FCW, GCN, Washington Technology and Defense Systems, these awards also recognize the companies supporting the government’s transformation and the most innovative technology initiatives across the public sector.

The 2020 Public Sector Innovation winners and Industry Innovators were announced today as well.  You can learn more about the overall Government Innovation Awards here.

We'll be running full profiles of the 2020 Rising Stars in early November. Until then, here's a quick salute this year's winners — a dozen individuals we're confident you'll be hearing about for years to come:

• Arvin Baroni
  Senior Product Manager, Product Lifecycle Management
  NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Katie Boeckl
  Privacy Risk Strategist
  National Institute of Standards and Technology
• Liz Dean
  Senior UX Strategist
  MetroStar Systems
• Kelsey Werder Monaghan
  Federal Account Manager, Department of Energy & NASA
  Dell Technologies
• Jamie Mullaney
  Manager
  Jefferson Consulting Group
• George Nicol
  Program Specialist, Solutions for Enterprise Wide Procurement
  NASA
• Meikle Paschal Jr.
  Robotic Process Automation Product Owner
  U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
• Nicholas Shields
  Research Analyst/Data Scientist
  Department of the Air Force
• Douglas Smith
  Project Manager, FEDSIM
  General Services Administration
• Kevin Smith
  Vice President
  C2S Consulting Group
• Sherri Sokol
  Innovation Lead
  Defense Information Systems Agency
• Ashley Strickland
  CACI Agile Solution Factory Growth & Communications Lead
  CACI