Skip to content
Merged
Show file tree
Hide file tree
Changes from 5 commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
6 changes: 3 additions & 3 deletions _data/callouts/home.yml
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -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: 2025-07-02-community-awards-results/
link_name: Learn More
123 changes: 123 additions & 0 deletions _posts/2025-07-02-community-awards-results.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -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: 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 Board (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.