Abt Employees Lauded for Work on Aflatoxins, PTSD, and Smartphone App in Indonesia

The best work of Abt Global’s employees took center stage at Abt’s Annual Meeting on Friday, June 30 in Bethesda, Md.

The honorees were recognized for their work, ranging from significantly improving our understanding of war zone trauma, to launching an internal database of Abt’s work, to creating a smartphone app that is helping village officials and community facilitators in Indonesia correctly follow procurement procedures and tax law.

Here are our 2017 award winners:

Tulika Narayan and Lauren Brown won the Clark Abt Prize for raising awareness of the health consequences of aflatoxin intake, which led to new dietary guidelines thus reducing the risk of liver cancer and childhood stunting in sub-Saharan Africa.

Nida Corry and Christianna Williams won the Outstanding Scientific Impact Award for producing useful findings through the National Vietnam Veterans Longitudinal Study that significantly enhanced the scientific understanding of war zone trauma and health.

Felicity Pascoe, Grace Palayukan, Novi Susanto, Sentot Satria, and Athman Ali won the Technical Innovation Award for creating Ruang Desa “village room,” a training and mentoring smartphone app, which strengthened the capacity of Indonesian city governments and shows clear potential for global scalability.

Puja Bhullar, Bettina Burgett, Sarah Moody, Katie Speanburg, and Susan Trenga won the Enterprise Innovation Award for the creation and launch of the Knowledge Hub, a rapidly adopted knowledge tool that centralized access to Abt’s collective experience and brainpower.

The 2017 President’s Award for Outstanding Leadership was awarded to people leading five different efforts:

• Korrin Bishop for her work on the Annual Homeless Assessment Report in which she took initiative to connect staff back to the real human lives and stories captured in the data, while boosting team morale.
• Carleen Ghio for breaking down barriers between newly formed Division of Health and Environment and the Data Science, Surveys, and Enabling Technologies Division.
• Lindsay Foley, Matt Malachowski, Patricia Rowan, Scott Giarla, Jennifer Pettis, Cholpon Chotkaraeva, and Krista Pages for creating a new and insightful staff survey that guides our efforts to improve employee engagement.
• Kossi Dahoui for his work to eliminate a trade barrier that bred corruption and for producing and disseminating visual training materials for traders in West Africa.
• Daniel Lee for his work on the Mozambique Clinic and Community HIV/AIDS Services Strengthening project in which he successfully rolled out a new implementation strategy that outperformed expectations.
• And Selena Ramkeesoon, Devona Overton, Cynthia Klein, Helga Luest, and Julie Sabol won the 2017 George Michaels Award for Outstanding Entrepreneurial Accomplishment for building a cross-company communications practice, achieving $30 million in sales, and developing a pipeline of opportunities across diverse clients.

All photos by Doug Trapp, Abt Global.