2015 Brookhaven Award Recipients
July 30, 2015
Brookhaven Awards are given to recognize key contributors in support functions whose performance and achievements represent outstanding service to the Laboratory. The 2015 Brookhaven Award recipients are:
Teresa Baker • Quality Management Office
As an employee at Brookhaven Lab for 23 years, Teresa Baker has been a key contributor and embraced the challenge of increasingly demanding roles with tenacity matched by few. From her prior work in the Environmental Restoration Department to her contributions to the Policy and Strategic Planning Office, Teresa's dedication, motivation, and work ethic have been exemplary.
As manager of the Assessment Support Center, Teresa has significantly improved our independent oversight function, benchmarking fellow Battelle laboratories. She has been and continues to be instrumental in the effort to engage with management system owners, as well as the DOE Brookhaven Site Office in the development of management system performance monitoring and assessment plans, and this has resulted in a more robust contractor assurance program.
She's an excellent manager, showing great effectiveness with limited resources yet constantly helping her team to improve. She's tireless in her self-improvement effort and always looks in the mirror first. She has recently become a certified quality auditor of the American Society for Quality and is engaged in coursework for the Harvard mentoring program.
Raymond Ceruti • Superconducting Magnet Division
During Raymond Ceruti’s 35 years in the Superconducting Magnet Division, he has consistently shown tremendous technical skills and leadership, even as the tasks he has been asked to undertake have changed dramatically. As the primary point-person for large-scale assembly projects, and as a supervisor for developing and building custom magnets, Ray has shown unerring attention to detail in the technical arena and in managing projects. He has provided engineers with invaluable feedback on how best to improve magnet quality, reduce technical and personal safety risks, and improve overall work efficiency.
The magnets in particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven have been particularly impacted by Ray’s work, but his influence extends to the Laboratory at large, where he has assisted in improving material handling training methods, installed vital and delicate equipment during the commissioning of the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, and led a team that contributed to the reclamation of $35 million worth of equipment from the original National Synchrotron Light Source.
George Ganetis • National Synchrotron Light Source II
George Ganetis has helped find solutions for challenges involving complex electrical systems in the hearts of accelerators at Brookhaven Lab for more than 35 years. He led the Electrical Engineering Group for the entire Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) complex and was responsible for the collider's electrical systems—yet George's crowning achievement was his design, implementation, and leadership for electrical engineering activities for the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) Project.
George's efforts were a driving factor in resolving both technical and project management issues for the NSLS-II Project. He developed several innovative technical solutions, including flexible power supply controls and major improvements to stabilize power supplies that are critical for achieving NSLS-II's performance capabilities.
George's contributions positioned the NSLS-II Project to successfully deliver 50 milliamps of circulating beam after only two-and-a-half months of commissioning. As a result of George's hard work, NSLS-II's power systems operate well within specifications and are expect to serve the facility—and the scientists who will do their research there—for decades to come.
Rich Travis • Safety & Health Services Division
For more than 27 years, Rich Travis has distinguished himself as a hard-working and exacting problem solver, with a real skill for navigating complex issues here at Brookhaven Lab.
After doing excellent work in the Nuclear Energy Department and the Reactor Division, Rich joined the Safety Engineering Group in 2000, where he established himself as a thoughtful member of the team, applying his knowledge of codes and standards to myriad issues. He has a talent for bringing together people with disparate views, enabling us to improve the Lab's work environment year after year.
Rich's reputation goes beyond Brookhaven. When personnel from other laboratories in the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science complex approach Brookhaven with an inquiry about slips, trips, and falls, and the best types of walking surfaces to help prevent them, Rich is the person with the answers.
Everyone at Brookhaven Lab has long benefited from his consistent and quiet dedication to fine work.
Grace Webster • Center for Functional Nanomaterials
Grace Webster is being recognized for her extraordinary contributions in support of research since joining Brookhaven Lab in 1987, especially her exceptional service as an administrator during the expansion phase of the Basic Energy Sciences Directorate initiated fifteen years ago and as a devoted coordinator of the users program at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) for the past ten years.
Grace’s consummate administrative skills and her ability to organize conferences and build the necessary support and user base for the CFN have been, and remain, of critical importance to the success of the Laboratory’s users’ programs. When it opened for operations in 2008, the CFN had 100 scientific users; in 2015, it boasts nearly 500. Grace’s handling of diverse, complex duties of many roles has brought the complexity of administering the CFN users program to a new dimension, helping to make it a model for users programs across the DOE complex.
2015-5860 | INT/EXT | Newsroom
