Meet the recipients of the 2026 UW–Madison IT Recognition Awards
Posted by
on
UW–Madison IT professionals gathered in Morgridge Hall on May 28 to celebrate the 2026 honorees of the UW–Madison IT Recognition Awards.
An annual tradition since 2020, the IT Awards recognize the dedication, innovation and impact of the university’s information technology employees.
“These awards are a moment for us to recognize and thank our colleagues for what they do,” said Chief Information Officer Didier Contis.
“This is our chance to pause, look around, and say: ‘We see you — and we appreciate you.’ As CIO, I’m really proud to support these awards, and I’m excited to celebrate what you bring to this work.”
A volunteer committee selected the 2026 honorees from dozens of nominations submitted by colleagues across the university. Congratulations to the honorees!
Ellen La Luzerne Community Builder Award
Jason Erdmann
IT Project Manager
Media, Education Resources & Information Technology (MERIT) | School of Education
Jason Erdmann is MERIT’s “culture keeper” — a 25-year help-desk veteran and, more recently, a project manager who has spent his career building and strengthening the IT community at UW–Madison. After the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted workplace rituals, Jason worked to restore them, organizing chili cookoffs and campfire cookouts to bring his team back together. He was an active member of MERIT’s Making Our Values Reality (MOVR) group, which fostered an intentional culture of inclusion and respect.
Jason is also a longstanding member and leader with UW IT Connects, a volunteer organization that brings IT professionals together across the university’s distributed IT landscape. He co-chairs Leadership Improv, contributes to the IT Professionals Conference and the Information Technology Leadership Development Program, and was part of the team that created Coffee Connections, which helps IT staff build relationships across the university. In his professional volunteer work, he co-chairs the UW–Madison Policy Planning Team and serves on the Policy Analysis Team and the Policy Review subcommittee. Jason has presented at EDUCAUSE, Common Solutions Group, the IT Professionals Conference, the Administrative Professionals Conference, and Lockdown and Cybersecurity Forward. Outside the university, he directs the ski patrol at Tyrol Basin and plays in the Oregon Community Band.
At the ceremony, Lisa Jansen — who nominated Jason — lauded his commitment to bringing people together: “Our IT community is as strong as it is because of people like Jason who give their time and expertise to ensure we all have opportunities to connect with and learn from each other.”
To build community, you need active buy-in from everybody. You can’t just make it happen by yourself.
Recognizes an IT community member for their role as a community builder and active volunteer in professional service to the broader community.
Named in honor of Ellen La Luzerne, a former desktop support team member in the Division of Information Technology, who passed away in 2023.
Janet E. Plato Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Award
Erik Geiger
Web Operations Manager
DoIT Communications | Division of Information Technology
Erik Geiger ensures that it.wisc.edu and DoIT’s intranet, DoITnet, are accessible and inclusive by design — not as an afterthought. As Web Operations Manager, he conducts quarterly audits to find broken links, accessibility barriers and inaccurate content. He has embedded digital accessibility checks into his team’s review workflows, authored KnowledgeBase articles on creating accessible content and led training sessions on accessibility tools, standards and best practices.
Erik’s advocacy extends across the division. He serves as Digital Accessibility Liaison, connecting colleagues with the Center for User Experience and the Office of Compliance. He also serves on the University Staff Congress, consistently raising DEI and accessibility issues in discussions with guest speakers and interview candidates. As a member of DoIT’s Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Committee (EDIC), he helped form the EDIC Book Club to create a regular space for colleagues to reflect on and discuss inclusion.
His commitment to learning has led him to earn two professional certifications: the Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) and a Certificate of Professional Development in Internet Accessibility Design and Policy from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
I knew Janet Plato, and I’ve never known a kinder, sharper professional. Being nominated for this award, let alone winning it, is an amazing honor.
Recognizes exemplary leadership displayed by an IT staff member in advancing diversity, equity and inclusion within the IT community.
Named in honor of Janet Plato, a former network engineer and developer at UW who passed away in 2016.
Lifetime Achievement Award
Lee Konrad
Associate Dean for Information Technology & Administration (Emeritus)
UW–Madison Libraries
Lee Konrad recently retired after nearly four decades at UW–Madison, leaving a legacy of durable improvements in how the university collaborates, governs and stewards technology. As Associate Dean for Information Technology & Administration in UW Libraries, he was a trusted voice across the IT community and a steady connector between the Libraries and university leadership — someone whose presence in a conversation reliably shifted it from “what’s hard right now” to “what we can build and sustain over time.”
Lee contributed meaningfully to UW governance and cross-functional initiatives, including IT leadership forums and research computing conversations. In data stewardship, he helped frame a Libraries-convened coordination model to align stakeholders across the full research data lifecycle, from collection through archiving, sharing and security. In university discussions about AI, he consistently emphasized information literacy, responsible and ethical use, and the need to anchor policy decisions in the realities of teaching, research and operations. He ensured UW Libraries expertise had a seat at the table, even when it wasn’t the obvious stakeholder — inclusive by default, and consistently bringing people in rather than drawing boundaries around who “owned” a topic.
Chief Technology Officer Todd Shechter, who presented the award, reflected on what made Lee’s leadership distinctive: “He understood that strong technology leadership in a place like UW–Madison is never about our IT systems. It is about people, it is about partnerships, and it is about creating conditions that help teaching, research, and service thrive.”
Todd quoted a long-time library colleague who captured Lee’s signature quality: “Lee has long been recognized by his colleagues and collaborators for being the one that sees both sides — both sides of any given issue, challenge or endeavor — making him incredibly thoughtful when considering, proposing or advocating for solutions and paths forward.”
No one achieves anything without community. I’ve never collected a paycheck from any other institution, and I’m thrilled to have done every minute of it.
Recognizes the contributions of a UW community member whose body of work in their entire career has had a significant impact on the university’s success.
Acknowledges individuals who have demonstrated evidence of sustained service, made an impact beyond their role, and have been involved in multiple university groups, projects and initiatives.
Rising Star Award
Erik Adel
Student Team Lead
General Help Desk | Division of Information Technology
In less than two years at the DoIT General Help Desk, Erik Adel has risen from front-line support to Student Team Lead — and made his mark well beyond the Help Desk queue. In that role, he maintains the Student Team Lead web application, meets regularly with teams and oversees case reviews and equipment decommissioning.
Erik played a key role in the General Help Desk’s transition to the Neurons ticketing system, contributing user experience testing and workflow feedback that helped shape the platform ahead of its July release. Last summer, he represented DoIT at SOAR, welcoming incoming students to university technology resources. His attention to detail and proactive communication have led to same-day resolutions of complex cross-team technical issues and earned recognition from User Services leadership for his customer-focused problem-solving.
Presenter Jade Schill noted that Erik’s nomination came from one of his peers on the Help Desk. She drew on Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly to describe what sets Erik apart: “Daring leaders create environments where people feel they truly belong, and you do exactly that. You listen, advocate for others, and help elevate their voices.”
It’s such a privilege to be able to support 70,000-plus affiliates — to teach, to learn, to conduct research that will change lives for generations.
Recognizes an IT professional who has been with the university for five or fewer years and whose record reflects exceptional growth in contribution to the profession.
Given to individuals who have demonstrated significant growth in their role or engagement in the larger university IT community and who show strong evidence of potential for future success and leadership.
Team Achievement Award
UW Theme 2.0 Project Team
Scott Berg, Leah Bowers, Josh Ciolkosz, Danielle Cranmer, Nate Finch, Matt Goins, Nick Gonzales, Kedar Joyner, Jenna Klinner, Danielle Lamberson Philipp, Cheyanne Lynch, Kate Price, Andrea Roenning, Julie Schroeder, Andy Summers, Jose Valdez and Nick Weaver
UW–Madison’s web ecosystem spans more than 6,500 independently managed websites. For years, inconsistent branding, accessibility risks and duplicated development effort limited what the university’s centralized web platform could offer — and adoption had plateaued. In just over a year, the UW Theme 2.0 Project Team changed that.
Working across DoIT’s WiscWeb team and the Office of Strategic Communication’s Digital Strategy team, the group rebuilt the university’s centrally supported WordPress theme from the ground up using WordPress’s block editor. They learned an entirely new development framework while balancing competing priorities and ongoing operational support — and built the new theme with accessibility testing integrated into every development cycle. The team conducted university-wide user research, ran beta testing programs, engaged distributed developers and maintained ongoing feedback loops with site owners throughout the process. A key innovation was migration tooling that automates approximately 90% of the transition from UW Theme Classic, enabling most site migrations to complete in roughly five minutes. Since launching in December 2025, the tooling has helped hundreds of sites begin or complete their migrations. UW Theme 2.0 now powers hundreds of university websites, with many more actively migrating.
Beyond their technical work, the team built a culture of shared ownership and learning. When a team exercise — using the block editor to recreate Bucky Badger — surfaced bugs and earned a temporary tattoo for the winning design, it captured something true about how they worked: with rigor, creativity and a genuine investment in each other.
Presenter Elizabeth Simcock, Associate Director for Web Platforms & Services in DoIT, noted that the team’s success started before any code was written: “One of the reasons that this team has been so successful is that they put in an extraordinary amount of time up front to think through what it means to do that. How do we do this when it gets hard? How do we do this right together, with leadership inside and outside of IT?”
Accepting on behalf of the team, Kedar Joyner thanked university developers who contributed feedback throughout the project, as well as April Ebacher, Jamie Gutkowski, Joe Tarter and Joe Van Boxtel, who built the original UW Theme years ago. “We get to experience the evolution of the UW Theme because of what you all started,” Kedar said.
Recognizes a team whose collective work to create or incorporate a solution for one or more projects has made a significant impact on the university.
Celebrates the power of collaboration and the ability of a team to selflessly work for the betterment of their unit, college or institution while addressing specific pain points and serving as a role model for how an ideal team should function.
Transformational Achievement Award
Brad Sanders
Enterprise Data Management Director
Data, Academic Planning & Institutional Research
When Brad Sanders joined UW–Madison, the university’s data landscape was highly fragmented. Institutional data was spread across multiple legacy platforms, manual processes created significant technical debt, and data consumers lacked a consistent way to discover and use authoritative information across systems. The result was duplicated effort, limited scalability and slowed decision-making.
Brad addressed this by leading the conception and implementation of the Badger Data Platform — a modern data ecosystem built around Denodo, a unified data virtualization layer that allows users to query across disparate datasets in real time through a single, secure connection without duplicating or migrating data. He also led the development of the Badger Data Access application, which replaced manual access-request processes with standardized workflows, automated approval routing and dynamic provisioning aligned with university governance practices. Within months of implementation, Denodo-provisioned users spanned 19 divisions across the university. Data access requests that once took weeks of manual coordination are now streamlined and auditable through a single system. Throughout the project, Brad worked closely with governance partners, security teams and data domain owners — navigating complex stakeholder needs and regulatory considerations while keeping the team focused and insulated from external noise. The Badger Data Platform has become a foundational component of the university’s data strategy, supporting research, academic planning and operational decision-making.
Presenters Sanjana Aleti and Wendy Gordon described a leader who “consistently finds solutions where others see roadblocks and brings people along with him in the process,” and who “leads with clarity, persistence, and genuine commitment to helping others succeed.” Accepting the award, Brad redirected the credit: “Without you all actually making these transformations happen, all of the things that we’ve accomplished would just be ideas.” He also paused to recognize Vice Provost Allison La Tarte. “Not every executive has the willingness to back change the way that she has,” he said. “A lot of this couldn’t have happened without that sort of support.”
Recognizes an IT community member who has significantly transformed the university through their efforts on a major IT project or initiative.
Acknowledges individuals who have gone above and beyond to create or incorporate innovative information or technical solutions that were essential to the success of their projects.
Unsung Hero Award
Ryan Larscheidt
IAM Technical Lead
Identity & Access Management | Division of Information Technology
Ryan Larscheidt is the technical backbone of UW–Madison’s Identity & Access Management (IAM) team — the engine, as his colleagues put it, that keeps operations running. In that role, he steers technical direction, ensures service quality and guides fellow engineers in developing their expertise. His work is largely invisible to end users, yet it reaches everyone: over 60,000 unique users log into university applications through the NetID Login service every day.
After a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, Ryan charted a path to re-engineer the monolithic NetID Login service architecture and migrate it to AWS. Within six months, he completed the migration without interrupting university services. When UW–Madison’s Workday migration required the IAM team to update thousands of database objects, sequence complex cutover activities and resolve issues around the clock over a holiday weekend, Ryan was central to making it work. His pattern recognition and system monitoring have become an early-warning resource for the broader IT enterprise — and he consistently makes time to help anyone on the team or across the university who needs it.
Presenter Abrianna Barca, IAM Associate Director, shared what Ryan’s colleagues said when asked to describe him in one word: thorough, versatile, thoughtful, firefighter, diligent, wizard, brilliant. She quoted one colleague’s summary: “Ryan is the glue that holds IAM together. His incredible institutional knowledge, combined with his ability to quickly understand technical problems as they arise, are unmatched by anyone I’ve worked with.” Abrianna added one more detail that got a laugh from the room: “His cat is hilariously vocal and often chimes in during meetings, which is quite the boost for team morale.”
Unsung Hero Award
Jessie Nemec
Software Developer
Software Development & Integration | UW–Madison Libraries
Jessie Nemec has been a driving force behind UW Libraries’ digital accessibility transformation. As a front-end developer and web strategist, she brings exceptional technical skill to the Libraries’ web platforms — and a rare blend of creativity and analytical rigor to every project she touches. What distinguishes Jessie most is her leadership in helping the Libraries understand, implement and operationalize accessibility standards in alignment with ADA Title II requirements.
Jessie led efforts to audit existing systems, identify barriers and implement improvements that meaningfully enhance the experience of users with disabilities. She approaches accessibility not as a compliance checkbox but as a core expression of the Libraries’ mission to provide equitable access to information. Her generosity as a mentor and educator is equally notable: she has developed training materials, facilitated workshops and provided one-on-one guidance for staff at all levels, building a shared culture of accessibility awareness across the organization. Her work has already made a lasting difference in the Libraries’ digital presence and continues to shape it for years to come.
Presenter Anna Huss captured what makes Jessie’s recognition so apt: “Jessie is one of those rare people whose impact is everywhere, even if you don’t see her name attached to it.” Huss noted she had seen Jessie meet her mentee in person for the first time just that afternoon — a detail that said something about the reach of Jessie’s investment in others.
Recognizes members of the UW IT community who are always present, performing great deeds and making significant contributions behind the scenes, yet their efforts often receive little or no outward recognition.
Unsung heroes are responsive and proactive and make a real difference to their co-workers by designing or implementing excellent technical solutions. They are critical to the functions of their department or unit, and their contributions are essential to the university’s success.