Page 49 - FCW, November/December 2020

Rising Stars
ARVIN BARONI
Senior Product Manager, Product Lifecycle Management NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Arvin Baroni makes the lives of thousands of engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory easier by simplifying the astoundingly complex job of designing and assembling new spacecraft.
Baroni oversees multiple critical projects that have helped the lab modernize its internal processes, including those that govern making spacecraft. Among JPL’s fleet of robotic spacecraft are the Juno probe now orbiting Jupiter and the Mars Science Laboratory, which included the Curiosity rover.
With concise communications and reporting structures, Baroni supports almost 2,500 JPL engineers with tools that help them stay organized and on track. Those efforts include a groundbreaking electronic authoring capability that standardizes procedures for creating instructions for spacecraft design and construction.
That capability is a particularly important step in
the crafting of the unique space vehicles JPL makes
for NASA. It also sets the stage for other JPL-specific workflows and Product Lifecycle Management applications to move away from paper-based procedures and become fully electronic.
Baroni also successfully concluded a 10-year JPL
effort to simplify and streamline mechanical fabrication operations. He guided the software development effort and negotiated the needs and priorities between two organizations within JPL — a fusion that came at a crucial moment for several developing missions.
During his three years in this JPL role, Baroni has become known for his ability to identify and balance the needs of multiple project participants. His managers say he brings a fine mix of technical know-how and people skills and is regularly sought out for the difficult jobs that must balance traditional approaches and modernized systems.
KATIE BOECKL
Privacy Risk Strategist
National Institute of Standards and Technology
When she was still a college student, Katie Boeckl began her government service as a communications intern at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Her growing interest in privacy and security drew her into the development of stakeholder guidance.
“One of the amazing things about NIST is the amount of exposure you get to real experts in the field,” Boeckl said. That experience convinced her to develop expertise of her own.
Now in her sixth year at the agency, Boeckl was deeply involved in the development and production of NIST’s Privacy Framework, which extends some of NIST’s information security principles and processes to privacy concerns. She also took a leadership role in developing the agency’s Privacy Engineering Collaboration Space
— an online, public-facing venue where experts can share open-source tools and solutions that support the development and integration of privacy policies and standards.
She introduced the concept behind the collaboration space to stakeholders, gathered feedback and refined the idea until it met with the approval of senior managers. She also developed the website and contracted with subject-matter experts to moderate the first topic area.
The collaboration space and the Privacy Framework are components of a larger effort to accelerate the maturity of the privacy engineering discipline, and Boeckl is playing a big part. She manages a blog series on the practice of de-identification — the process used to mask personally identifiable information in data — with the goal of developing technical guidance to support the
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