Page 64 - FCW, November/December 2019

Rising Stars
ANNA CORDREY
Deputy Program Manager, NASA
Anna Cordrey traveled around the world and taught yoga and English in Thailand before she joined the staff at NASA. She still strives to maintain a healthy work/life balance and has even taught a yoga class for her co-workers.
Cordrey handles the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs at NASA. They provide about $200 million in annual awards to small companies to help them design and market their technology to NASA. In that role, she oversees the processing of more than 3,000 proposals and 600 awards annually.
She is also modernizing the decades-old Electronic Handbook, the IT system that manages the proposal solicitation and award process from beginning to end. It is “basically our master tracker for everything,” Cordrey said.
Colleagues say she succeeds because she is passionate about identifying and solving problems. But Cordrey credits her family and friends for her success — her immigrant parents who had big dreams for her, her mentors at NASA, her husband and her three children.
“Every day, I wake up loving life,
MAHTAB EMDADI
Regional Sales Director, Dell Technologies
By pioneering a new way to keep the State Department’s email and other communications running smoothly, Mahtab Emdadi may have also helped keep U.S. foreign policy running smoothly.
Unpredictable outages wreaked havoc with the department’s legacy communications systems and made it difficult for employees to maintain their foreign relations mission.
In her role as a sales director at
Dell, Emdadi recommended that officials implement an infrastructure based on high-availability disaster recovery and information resource management so that systems could continue operating despite outages.
She incorporated a three-site architecture that was built for continuous availability. With automated failover for applications, the technology supports scheduled system maintenance downtime and guards against unscheduled outages. As a result, diplomats have more reliable access to crucial information during data center migrations,
OMID GHAFFARI-TABRIZI
Acquisitions Lead, Centers of Excellence, General Services Administration
A few years ago, Omid Ghaffari-Tabrizi left a job at a contracting law firm in sunny Florida on a heartfelt mission to help transform the federal government into an agile, responsive and forward- thinking IT buyer.
By taking the lead on the General Services Administration’s centers
of excellence acquisitions team,
he became the trailblazer for the agency’s efforts to make the centers’ acquisition packages the go-to resource for federal agencies while injecting agile methodology into all aspects of the program.
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knowing that my full potential as a human being on this Earth is still to come because of the support of these people,” Cordrey said.
application upgrades, user errors and network outages.
Beyond making diplomatic
life easier for State employees, Emdadi’s efforts have saved nearly $10 million in infrastructure costs while reducing the time spent on testing and maintenance. The next phase of the program will take
those capabilities to the cloud via
a multi-cloud architecture as a managed service. The move will maintain system resiliency while incorporating features such as self- service, IT chargeback/showback and automation.