Outstanding Staff Accomplishments Celebrated at Abt Global Annual Meeting
Rockville, Md.—Abt Global recognized the outstanding achievements of 40 staff members across the company at its recent annual meeting.
“These leaders at all levels around the world have made exceptional contributions to the fields in which we work and to our success as a company,” said Abt’s president and CEO, Kathleen Flanagan. “We are very proud to celebrate their accomplishments with our worldwide staff.”
Clark Abt Prize for Outstanding Social Impact: Paradigta Academy, KOMPAK, Indonesia
Enurlaela Hasanah, Grace Palayukan, Felicity Pascoe, Lilis Suryani and Anna Winoto
In Indonesia, women’s participation in village-level government is low due to barriers such as male domination and limited skills. To address this, Abt created a one-year course called The Paradigta Academy to promote self-empowerment and build community organization and technical skills to help primarily low-income, disenfranchised women across more than 400 villages make an impact on village law. Between 2016 and 2017, more than 2,500 women graduated from the program. Among the results: Fifty-one new women-led policies were proposed or ratified by district and village governments. In four villages, women ratified rules to increase the marrying age to 18.
Outstanding Scientific Impact
Doug McDonald, Kenneth Carlson and Sarah Jalbert
The team’s research produced the first nationwide analysis of opioid prescribing and diversion by doctor shopping. Their work played a key role in identifying that the lack of guidance and support to physicians prescribing opioids was a significant, if not a principal, contributor to the creation of the present opioid epidemic.
Stas Kolenikov
A series of papers on the collection, analysis and weighting of survey data by Stas has had an enormous impact across multiple scientific fields and organizations. One paper on bootstrap weights for surveys has changed the way statisticians think about survey weights. Based on his work, the software company Stata has adopted Stas’s approach into its official syntax, an impressive accomplishment that has benefitted tens of thousands of researchers across the world.
Technical Innovation Award
Carolina Torres Gutierrez, Benedict Holland, Gabriel Krieshok, Ximena McCollum, Kunaba Oga, Justin Stein, Kate Stillman and Paula Wood
These staff members created a new app that enables users to identify and count mosquito eggs automatically using any smart phone. The custom algorithm provides an instant summary of counted eggs with higher degrees of accuracy than manual counting — saving hundreds of hours for field technicians and entomologists.
Enterprise Innovation Award
Damon Anderson, Johann Bent, Sarah Herhold, Mauricio Poodts, Sarah Stepina and Beth Teehan
This team created a state-of-the art, cloud-based data collection platform that allows us to field outbound and inbound, in-person, web, smart phone and interactive voice-response surveys within a single management and reporting structure. We now have one platform for the complete data life cycle, and the security of this system allows us to do work requiring more stringent levels of security by ensuring we properly safeguard our clients’ data.
George Michaels Award for Outstanding Entrepreneurial Accomplishment
Sally Cameron, Abigail Conrad, Deborah Dangay, Sarah Kozyn and Michele Laird
The Food Security and Agriculture team significantly expanded Abt’s agricultural portfolio, winning important work in Cambodia, Bangladesh, Uganda and Egypt. The innovative development approaches they used included: improving linkages between small farmers and wholesale buyers; working with vendors to use new marketing practices that encourage purchasing nutritious foods; and improving economic opportunities and nutrition for many mothers.
Jamie Holmes, Danielle Hunt, Meghan Lynch, Kaylene Ritter and Constance Travers
These awardees understood early the emerging environmental dangers PFAS per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) chemicals pose to the health and environment of communities across the U.S. They combined Abt’s expertise in assessing environmental impacts with our expertise in integrating health and communications to win exciting work with a wide range of clients.
President’s Award for Outstanding Project Management Leadership
Dr. Isseu Diop Toure
Dr. Toure was recognized for her leadership in forging key public-private partnerships in Senegal to improve health outcomes.
Erin Neill
Neill has created a highly mature project management process that helps us track company initiatives, streamline operations and deliver tools so that staff can do their jobs more effectively and efficiently.
President’s Award for Outstanding Leadership
Change Management
Ayesha Lutschini
Lutschini was recognized for significantly advancing the mainstreaming of gender equity and social inclusion throughout Abt Australia’s largest program, the Papua New Guinea Australia Governance Partnership.
Laura Peck
As the leader of the Global Research, Monitoring and Evaluation Capability Center, Peck created a truly global community of researchers.
Abigail Donner and Brian Keilson
Over the past year, Donner and Keilson shaped how Abt now approaches gender equality and social inclusion, internally and externally.
President’s Award for Outstanding Talent Development Leadership
Sung-Woo Cho
Cho designed and launched the Data Science Fellowship program, working with a larger team from SEP and DSET, to broaden Abt’s leadership in using machine learning and artificial intelligence in our program work.
About Abt Global
Abt Global is an engine for social impact, dedicated to moving people from vulnerability to security. Harnessing the power of data and our experts’ grounded insights, we provide research, consulting and technical services globally in the areas of health, environmental and social policy, technology and international development. http://www.abtglobal.com
Contact:
Mary Maguire
Mary_Maguire@abtassoc.com
301-347-5859
