2024 Aptima Annual Achievement Awards
Recognizing the best in employee contributions and achievements
Woburn, MA – February 10, 2025 – On Thursday, January 23, Aptima employees gathered to recognize their colleagues’ outstanding accomplishments over the previous year through the Aptima Annual Achievement Awards. These awards are meant to convey appreciation to individuals, teams, and groups of employees that perform above and beyond reasonable job expectations, contribute promising innovative ideas, or demonstrate exceptional leadership qualities. Nominations can be submitted by any Aptima employee and winners are selected by employee committees that change from year to year. The 2024 awardees are listed below.
Citizen of the Year
The Citizen of the Year Award recognizes employees who go the extra mile in making Aptima a great place to work. This type of person may not be in any official position of power but takes it upon themselves to make the workplace more enjoyable and humane. Aptima’s 2024 Citizens of the Year were Katie Jones, Vice President, People Operations, and Peter Cinibulk, Division Lead Engineer, Performance Augmentation Systems
Mentor of the Year
This Award recognizes Aptima employees who pro-actively develop and are genuinely committed to employees’ growth, development, and cultural integration into the organization. The 2024 awardees were Alex Case, Team Lead and Senior Software Engineer, and Jessica Shenberger-Trujillo, Deputy Divsion Director, Training Learning and Readiness.
Best Paper
The Best Paper Award recognizes excellence in preparing written products that disseminate Aptima’s work to a broader audience beyond employees and the company’s immediate customers. The 2024 Best Paper award went to Olivia Fox Cotton, Justin Morgan, Lisa Lucia, Will Dupree, Jordan Coker, and Matthew Ewer for Training ML classification models of warfighter state with fNIRS, presented at the 2024 Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC), Orlando, FL.
Best Teamwork
Aptima’s Best Teamwork Award recognizes cooperative groups that achieve Company goals or objectives of material value and quality by 1) pooling their complementary skills and knowledge, 2) holding each other personally responsible for doing their individual fair share of work, and 3) accepting mutual accountability for the ultimate outcome of their efforts. This year’s award recognized the company’s PROPEL for MRTS-3D Team: Zack Freeman, Wilmer Saint-Hilaire, Alex Case, Jason Hall, Zane Hamadi, Chris Jenkins, Colin Dawson, Cherrise Ficke, Daniel Nguyen, Eddie Cabrera (PR), Rolando Roques (PR), Amanda Figueroa (PR), Tara Vanderbur.
Outstanding Initiative
Recognizing Aptima employees who pro-actively develop and successfully implement a new idea, this year’s Outstanding Initiative Award went to Summer Rebensky for the Gaming Research Integration for Learning Laboratory® (GRILL®) Collider event.
Best Technical Achievement
This Award recognizes excellence in research and development by an Aptima employee, or a group of employees, within the structure of ongoing projects. The 2024 award went to the IRONPIPE Team: Peter Cinibulk, Joshua Shireman, Hunter Gongloff, Aaron DeLory, Cameron Roudebush, and Nick Abele, for their work on this innovative IOT platform.
Operational Excellence
The Operational Excellence Award recognizes those at Aptima who ensure the smooth and flawless execution of daily operations through proactive planning, attention to detail, and a drive for continuous process improvement, all with a spirit of teamwork and collaboration. The 2024 award went to Aptima’s People Operations Team: Katie Jones and Bella Perault.
