Merge pull request #1770 from mrmundt/2025-awards

Announce 2025 award winners

Author: mrmundt

_data/callouts/home.yml

@@ -11,8 +11,8 @@ items:
       Join us at our third conference in Philadelphia, PA, October 6-8, 2025.<br><br>
     link: https://us-rse.org/usrse25/
     link_name: Register Now!
-  - title: US-RSE Organizational Membership
+  - title: 2025 Community Awards Winners Announced
     subtitle: >
-      Support US-RSE as an organizational member.  Join by December 1, 2025 to be a Founding Member.
-    link: https://us-rse.org/org-membership/
+      The four 2025 Community Awards Winners have been announced!
+    link: 2025-09-04-community-awards-results/
     link_name: Learn More

_posts/2025-09-04-community-awards-results.md

@@ -0,0 +1,123 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "2025 Community Award Results"
+tags: [community-awards]
+posted_by: Miranda Mundt
+---
+
+## Overview
+
+The 2025 US-RSE Community Awards recognize and celebrate the impactful
+contributions of individuals and teams who are advancing the field of research
+software engineering in the United States.
+
+This year there were two categories of awards:
+
+- **Technical Excellence**: Recognizes outstanding technical contributions that
+  materially advance research software engineering practice. This award
+  celebrates "the things RSEs do that are normally ignored."
+- **Community Impact and Leadership**: Honors leadership and service that
+  amplifies the reach, visibility, and growth of the RSE profession. This
+  award focuses on people who step beyond their own codebases to promote
+  belonging, engagement, and awareness.
+
+Each award also had two subcategories: **Student/Early Career** (current
+student or within five years of starting their career) and **Professional**.
+
+## Winners
+
+We are pleased to announce this year's winners for our two award categories.
+Each winner will receive a certificate as well as a $250 gift card.
+Please join us in congratulating our 2025 winners!
+
+### US-RSE Technical Excellence
+
+**Student/Early Career: Manoj Sundarrajan**
+
+Manoj Sundarrajan is a Research Software Engineer in the Vehicle Grid
+Integration group at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). He co-led the
+development of Caldera, an EV charge modeling toolkit that was a 2023
+R&D 100 finalist. Caldera is utilized by several leading private industry
+institutions, research organizations, universities, and national labs. Manoj's
+research focuses on developing tools for modeling and simulation of EV
+charging on the grid, as well as creating smart charge management solutions to
+enhance grid stability and reliability.
+
+In addition to his role at INL, Manoj is a PhD student in the Systems
+Engineering at Colorado State University. Before joining INL in 2020, he
+earned his MS degree in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of
+Houston and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from
+Anna University, India.
+
+**Professional: JAWS Team - Daniela Cassol, Mario Melara, Elais Player-Jackson,
+Ramani Kothadia, Setareh Sarrafan, Nicholas Tyler**
+
+JAWS (JGI Analysis Workflow Service) is a scalable, multi-site workflow execution framework
+developed at the Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), to support
+large-scale genomic data analysis. Designed for robust and secure scientific computing across
+national DOE facilities, JAWS empowers researchers to run complex, containerized workflows
+seamlessly across the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Environmental
+Molecular Sciences Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Argonne Leadership
+Computing Facility. It integrates Cromwell, HTCondor, and Globus to ensure reproducibility,
+portability, and performance monitoring, aligning with the DOE's Integrated Research
+Infrastructure vision.
+
+The JAWS team includes software engineers, data scientists, and user support specialists who
+collaboratively develop infrastructure and tools to meet evolving scientific and technical
+demands. The team supports production workflows across diverse domains, including
+metagenomics, genome assembly, transcriptomics, and annotation. Through continuous user
+engagement, strategic partnerships, and open science practices, JAWS contributes to the DOE
+scientific mission and energy research.
+
+JAWS innovations include performance dashboards, support for GPU workloads, and secure
+multi-site job orchestration. As leaders in scalable workflow management, the JAWS team is
+advancing findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) workflows and empowers the
+scientific community with robust, portable bioinformatics pipelines.
+
+
+### US-RSE Community Impact and Leadership
+
+**Student/Early Career: Daniel Madren**
+
+Daniel joined Purdue University in April 2024 as a Senior Research Development
+Administrator for the newly established Center for Research Software
+Engineering (RSE) within the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC). In
+his role as Program Manager for RSE, he leads the design and execution of
+strategic project management processes, including intake workflows, service
+rate development, and long-term business planning. Daniel plays a pivotal
+role in shaping the Center's operational strategy, cultivating cross-functional
+collaborations with academic and government stakeholders, and driving
+sustainable growth through diversified funding models. Daniel draws on deep
+expertise in both predictive and agile methodologies to manage a diverse
+portfolio of research projects. He also serves as Co-Chair of the US-RSE
+Group Leaders Network, where he supports national coordination and
+knowledge-sharing among RSE leaders to advance the research software community.
+
+
+**Professional: Rinku Gupta**
+
+Rinku Gupta is a Research Software Specialist and Technical Product Manager
+with over 20 years of experience in scientific computing. At Argonne National
+Laboratory, she leads multi-institutional computing projects and efforts to
+improve high-performance scientific software through research and community
+engagement.
+
+Her work focuses on software sustainability, productivity, and fault tolerance
+at extreme scale. She has conducted research on DOE-funded efforts including
+the IDEAS, BSSw.io, and Argo projects, the VeloC checkpointing library, and
+the CESAR co-design center. As product manager for Aurora GPT and BSSw.io,
+she coordinates across scientific teams to support large-scale AI models for
+science, aligning priorities and fostering collaboration.
+
+Ms. Gupta is Editor-in-Chief of the Better Scientific Software website
+(BSSw.io), a community resource focused on improving software quality and
+sustainability in computational science. She is also a recognized leader in
+the Research Software Engineer (RSE) movement. She served on the US-RSE
+Association Steering Committee (2023–2024) and has helped define and advocate for the
+RSE role at Argonne and across the broader HPC community. She has led
+lab-wide initiatives, cross-divisional collaboration, and peer networks
+supporting RSEs.
+
+She holds a B.E. in Computer Engineering from Mumbai University and
+an M.S. from The Ohio State University.
+