On February 12, Dr. Joseph Rios, from the Aviation Systems Division's Systems Modeling and Optimization Branch, was recognized as a winner at the San Francisco Federal Executive Board, or SFFEB, 2020 Federal Employee of the Year Awards, or FEYA, hosted in San Francisco.
The SFFEB represents 160 agencies and 44,500 federal employees in the nine-county Bay Area. The Federal Employee of the Year Awards is the Bay Area federal community's acknowledgement of the extraordinary accomplishments of the nominees.
Chief Engineer of NASA's drone traffic management project, Dr. Rios won in the Professional Engineering category for his work on Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management (UTM), and specifically, for “leading the technical development of a revolutionary approach to safely and efficiently integrating a new class of aircraft into our skies.”