Institute for Telecommunication Sciences / About ITS / Awards / 2016 Bronze Medal Awards

2016 Bronze Medal Awards

Seventeen ITS staff members shared four DoC Bronze Medal Awards for work performed in FY 2016. The Bronze Medal is a Department of Commerce Honor Award granted by the head of an operating unit or Secretarial Officer for superior performance.

Kristen Davis, George Engelbrecht, William (“Billy”) Kozma, Julie Kub, Abdalla Elmedani, Ken Tilley, William (“Bill”) Ingram, Mike Chang, and Frank Sanders shared a group award with Gary Patrick and Christine Mattingly of the Office of Spectrum Management for development of the AWS-3 Radio Frequency Coordination Portal (RFCP) to coordinate spectrum sharing. The RFCP facilitates frequency coordination between federal incumbent agencies and commercial entrants in the 1695–1710 MHz spectrum band through process automation. The team developed and deployed the RFCP under punishing time and funding constraints—a beta version was deployed after only five months of requirements identification, development, and testing, including a two-week window for incumbent testing and feedback.

Douglas Anderson, an Intern in the Pathways program, received an individual award for leading a research team that developed a prototype software defined radio for inclusion in the Spectrum Monitoring Boulder Test bed—a key project milestone. While maintaining a challenging engineering course load, he rapidly gained expertise in software defined radio configuration and testing and developed and integrated the new system into the Spectrum Monitoring database.

Gerardo Saqueton and Anton Nguyen-Vu received an award for meeting aggressive deadlines for testing Wireless Priority Services (WPS) network protocols now under development for LTE commercial cellular networks. WPS prioritizes the calls of federal, state, local, tribal and territorial national security and emergency personnel (.e.g., the President, Governors, Chiefs of Police) to ensure they can communicate during emergencies when cellular networks are overloaded. The test results allowed inclusion of clear, precise, and quantifiable capability requirements in Government service agreements for LTE WPS.

Robert Booth, Brian Gomez, Ted Mullen, Jacob Neal, and Gunnar Philipp of ITS shared an award with Bart Gibbon of the Office of Policy Analysis and Development for outstanding teamwork and innovative cross-location collaboration to successfully deploy and implement improved security and state-of-the-art technology on NTIA’s systems infrastructure, laying the foundation for further improved accessibility and collaboration among ITS sponsors and federal agency partners.

ITS Bronze Award recipients. From left, Mike Chang, Bill Ingram, Kristen Davis, Julie Kub, Ken Tilley, Billy Kozma, and George Engelbrecht shared a team award; Doug Anderson received an individual award; Gerry Saqueton and Anton Nguyen-Vu shared a team award; Brian Gomez, Robert Booth, Ted Mullen, and Gunnar Philipp shared a team award.