Top civil servants honored with Service to America Medals

Nine federal employees were honored Wednesday night for their contributions to public service with the 2005 Service to America medals.

The awards program was created in 2002 by the Atlantic Media Company (publisher of Government Executive, National Journal and The Atlantic) and the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization committed to revitalizing federal government service.

"Through the Service to America Medals, we give the best within government their due respect, and honor them for making a very real difference in the lives of people across our country and around the world," said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership. "There is nothing more critical to government's success than attracting the best and brightest to serve."

This year's award winners were honored in nine categories:

• Federal Employee of the Year: Orlando Figueroa, a NASA employee from Silver Spring, Md., who led the development of the Mars Exploration Rover project.
• Career Achievement: Barbara Turner of Falls Church, Va., and recently retired from the U.S. Agency for International Development, who spent a 40-year career fighting childhood diseases in Egypt, leading USAID's efforts to combat HIV/AIDS, and raising hundreds of millions of dollars to fund development efforts around the globe.
• Call to Service: Kevin McAleenan of Washington, D.C., director of the Office of Anti-Terrorism at the Customs and Border Protection bureau. Inspired to public service after the 9/11 attacks, this young lawyer quit his private sector job and moved across the country to help better secure the nation's ports and borders from terrorists.
• Justice and Law Enforcement: Elizabeth Grossman, an attorney at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from Brooklyn, N.Y., who secured EEOC's second largest sexual discrimination settlement ever in landmark case against Morgan Stanley.
• National Security: Alan Estevez of Washington, D.C., a Defense Department employee who implemented the use of Radio Frequency Identification by the military, transforming military logistics for the 21st century.
• Homeland Security: Steven Bice, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employee from Atlanta, Ga., who developed the Strategic National Stockpile and CDC's Emergency Operations Center, two of the country's most effective emergency preparedness organizations in the public health field.
• International Affairs: Tobin Bradley of Washington, D.C., a State Department employee who organized 15 local elections in southern Iraq and developed a voting system that the U.N. used as the basis for the January 2005 national elections.
• Science and Environment: Subhashree Madhavan and the Rembrandt Project Team of the National Cancer Institute Center for Bioinformatics at the National Institutes of Health, who created a national brain tumor database that could lead to new cancer treatments and revolutionize the way cancer research is conducted.
• Social Services: Terence Lutes, an IRS employee from Alexandria, Virginia, who led the development of the popular eFile system that has allowed millions of Americans to get their tax refunds in as few as 10 days, while also cutting processing costs for government by as much as 90 percent.