Kudos & Congratulations

Congratulations to Ray Carsey (Network & Communications Infrastructure) for winning the April 2017 prize drawing!

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UIT staff recognized for their excellent work

Lisa Osborne has been amazing for the HR move and getting us up and running!

She has worked weekends and been in constant communication with me or our leadership team to determine what we needed, the timeframe we needed the work by, and literally just made it happen. No matter how big the project, she was positive and remembered so many little details that I was constantly amazed.

This has been no small project moving an entire department off campus, and we were up and running by Monday when she said we would be - and she was here to support all of the changes we had included with our new phone system!!

I can’t say enough about her knowledge and customer support. She truly deserves to be recognized for her efforts!

~ Jessica Hampton, administrative manager, Human Resources

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BIG thank you to Levi Conner for getting the new chiller plant installation project completed so fast! He was a great help in getting this project back on track. 

~ Dennis Denham, electronics shop supervisor, Facility Operations

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Many of you have had the pleasure of working with Jon Thomas, Director or Teaching & Learning Technologies, over the past several years. He recently received his Ph.D. from Utah State University in Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences. When I hired Jon several years ago as the associate director at TLT he made it clear that he intended to finish his doctoral work. Through the challenges of full-time work at the U, a young family and the whims of his dissertation committee he persevered. He now joins Dr. Qin Li and Dr. Fernando Rubio in bringing deep knowledge and research practices to improve how we apply technologies and instructional design theories to help students and faculty engage in effective learning interactions. In fact, they are presenting research they’ve conducted on Canvas data at this summer’s Instructure Canvas world conference as well as publishing their research. We’re so lucky to have these dedicated scholars working with UOnline and TLT and especially fortunate to have Jon’s leadership, cheerfulness and keen insights on the leadership teams of the Office of Undergraduate Studies and UIT.

Please join me in congratulating Dr. Jon Thomas on this milestone in his academic, professional and personal journey.

~ Cory Stokes, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies

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Congratulations to Jody Sluder, Earl Lewis and Jayci Minjares for becoming Certified Scrum Masters (CSM).

- Jill Brinton, UIT Project Management Office

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Lisa Osborne, thank you for jumping and taking the initiative to lead and coordinate the Account Executive team and volunteering to resolve issues without complaint on the ACC Phone Replacement project. Your commitment to this project has been, hands down, very appreciated! 

Sam Lankford and Eric Jensen, thank you for all your hard work, commitment and ownership to ensure the quality and efficiency on all the phone lines you had to coordinate with our vendor on the Centrex programming and porting numbers. 

There are so many more people on this project who have been putting in many hours, working together as a team and partnering with our vendor to ensure we get all of the Centrex phone lines replaced before the infrastructure is relocated. Thank you everyone for your hard work! Let's keep it up!

~ Jayci Minjares, UIT Project Management Office

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CHPC would like to give kudos to David Richardson. David has been with CHPC since 1997 and his technical skills are many: Linux administration; VMWare administration; security; networking; monitoring; backups; and more. David’s notable for his approachability and friendliness. He also excels at keeping his skills and knowledge up to date. His current focus in is the virtualization area and is working hard on specifications for the new Protected Environment (PE) VM Farm. CHPC was just awarded an NIH grant to upgrade and refresh our current PE. David’s contributions are a valuable part of CHPC’s operation!

We would also like to recognize the contributions of David Heidorn. As the resident Windows expert in a sea of Linux purists, he manages to keep a positive attitude and contributes significantly to our operation. David is outgoing and easy to talk to. His functions not only include Windows desktop and server support, but he also runs our archive backups and is growing his Mac and Linux skills as well. He recently took on learning Python, and is actively involved in the local Python user’s group. Not only does he work full-time, but is finishing up a degree at SLCC, and plans to continue his education at the U next year. He is also actively engaged in the PE refresh project as part of this environment is a large Windows server used by researchers for statistical and other Windows software. He has worked at CHPC since 2013 and while he may take the occasional jibe for his minority (Windows) views, his expertise and positive attitude are very appreciated!

~ Julia Harrison, Center for High Performance Computing

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Tyler Sauer does an exceptional job for us. My team loves it when they get him on the phone to help with something. They say he’s helpful, inquisitive, smart, and tenacious in solving a problem.

~ Chris Stucker, Facility Operations

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A very big “Thank you!” and “Kudos!!” to our Network Team for their quick action and professionalism dealing with the internet connectivity issue that happened last week. I know that there were many Network & Communications Infrastructure (NCI) employees that jumped into action to troubleshoot, gather data, and help find a resolution as quickly as possible. Bryan Morris, Tim Urban, and others headed off quickly to server closets, and Curtis Larsen and Danial Ebling began to analyze and identify data on the issue.

Bryan’s first conversation with me as he headed to help was related to my UTV service, and he quickly checked to see if we were still on the air (we were). It was very thoughtful – even though he didn’t have time to stop and talk, he was mindful of my service and my customers. More important was the way Bryan handled a conversation with the vendor. Bryan was polite, calm, and helped to convey the sense of urgency in a simple and straightforward way. Kudos to Bryan, and to the entire network team!

~ John Wardle, UIT Network & Communications Infrastructure

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I would like to give a huge thank you to Roger Kowallis. He has been working for the last several months on a project to roll out an assortment of new “snippets” (snippets are web page building tools in our content management system) and he has just done SUCH an amazing job of pulling everything together. I am so impressed with the creative problem solving and attention to detail that he has demonstrated with this project. A big focus of Roger’s efforts was testing the snippets from every angle to proactively identify any issues they may have in the WYSIWYG editor -- which, if you know anything about WYSIWYG editors, you know they can be VERY finicky and buggy. When he did find issues, the solutions he came up with were absolutely ingenious. I’m really excited about rolling out this project (coming soon!) because our editors are going to LOVE the new additions, and thanks to Roger, they’ll have a far easier time using them!

~ Barb Iannucci, University Support Services

 

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