Six employees from Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SSC) Atlantic were selected as Top Scientists and Engineers of the Year by the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition (ASN RD&A).

Awardees were presented the Dr. Delores M. Etter Top Scientists and Engineers Awards, July 13, at the Pentagon.

Computer engineer Brent Misenheimer, computer scientists Nicholas Bartkowiak, Kyle Smith and Stephen Bowman, and electronics engineer Kerry Loyd won team award honors for providing an end-to-end solution for the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) mission environment. The USNO Network Redesign is one of the Navy's top efforts, supporting the USNO's mission to provide astronomical and timing data which ensures accurate navigation and supports communications on Earth and in space. This data is also used extensively by other government agencies and the general public in applications ranging from celestial observations to navigation to almanacs.

The USNO Network Redesign team carefully analyzed decades worth of agreements, designs and specifications, and conducted hundreds of hours of stakeholder interviews. They walked, crawled and inspected a variety of spaces, including the most modern laboratories in downtown Washington, DC, underground tunnels and isolated desert outposts. They employed a battery of discovery tools to research and design a way forward.

SSC Atlantic's Joshua Lewis won in the category of Emergent Investigator for his work on the engineering and technical refresh of the Navy Cyber Defense Operations Center (NCDOC) Forensics Local Area Network (FLAN) 2.0. Implementation of FLAN 2.0, the Navy's newest, cutting-edge incident response and forensic analysis network suite, makes the NCDOC one of the most capable cyber defense organizations in the Department of Defense. The speed and efficiency of FLAN 2.0 increased malware analysis and review capacity by 50 percent.

Lewis' technical and engineering expertise spans digital forensics, network and security engineering, as well as multiple cybersecurity domains, enabling him to rapidly identify optimum solutions to the most complex problems. Lewis is SSC Atlantic's cyber forensics technical lead, an advanced level ethical hacker, certified digital forensics analyst and expert network security engineer.

"The technical excellence of these scientists and engineers, and the operational impact to the Department of the Navy of their achievements, is very significant," said SSC Atlantic Executive Director Chris Miller. "Their efforts and recognition reflect well on the relevance of our information warfare mission and the expertise of our SSC Atlantic team."

The annual ASN RD&A Dr. Delores M. Etter Top Scientists and Engineers Awards program was established in 2006 to recognize the excellence of the Department of the Navy's highest performing scientists and engineers who have made significant contributions in their fields, to the department and to Sailors, Marines and the future fleet.

SSC Atlantic provides systems engineering and acquisition to deliver capabilities to the naval, joint and national warfighter through the acquisition, development, integration, production, test, deployment, and sustainment of interoperable command, control, communication, computers, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (C4ISR), cyber and information technology (IT) capabilities that enable information warfare for national defense and perform other functions as directed by higher authority.

For more information, visit http://www.navy.mil, http://www.facebook.com/usnavy, or http://www.twitter.com/usnavy.

For more news from Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, visit http://www.navy.mil/.