Award Winners

Dr. Laurie Elwyn
CSU Health Network
Dr. Laurie Elwyn is the director of Medical Services at the CSU Health Network. In this role, she not only provides direct patient care to students, but also overseeing other physicians, all laboratory, radiology, pharmacy, dental, physical therapy, optometry, clinical nutrition, immunization, and allergy services. She is described as a quiet, gentle person who really shines when the going gets tough. Laurie led the team through the meningitis outbreak a year ago, and has also led the conversion to electronic medical records and combining services with the counseling center. This consummate leader is always looking for ways to make services more accessible and to dismantle barriers. Laurie is a professional who cares about the people around her, cares about the students in our community, and strives to make CSU a better place for all of us.

Kylan Marsh
Advancement Information Services
kylan Marsh implements or enhances key initiatives for the University that result in tangible benefits. These include continuing the transition to paperless fund-raising and designing and building a robust displaying the complex giving histories of our most loyal donors. Says Pat Burns, our Vice President for Information Technology: “kylan Marsh has been instrumental in rolling out our new model of distributed development of central applications. This model will allow the entire institution to benefit from application development that heretofore was restricted only to individual units. This represents a cultural change as well as a process change, and as such required diligent leadership and commitment from kylan.”

Chris O’Dell
Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere
Chris O’Dell is a Research Scientist-III at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (or CIRA), where he leads the effort to write and test the carbon dioxide retrieval algorithm for the upcoming Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) mission being led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. OCO is designed to make precise, time-dependent global measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide from an Earth-orbiting satellite. His project collaborations with team members at CSU, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, as well as his instrumental work with NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, have brought considerable recognition to the greater CSU community and will pay dividends for the university in the long term.

Chris has a talent for combining the big picture with the attention and detail needed to make projects succeed. Described as a “Dynamo,” Chris is an energetic and charismatic leader who garnishes “bottom up” respect from team members by demonstrating exhaustive technical knowledge and by prioritizing project needs.

Christopher Rithner
Department of Chemistry
Christopher Rithner is the key force behind the modern instrumentation available in the Central Instrument Facility which serves five colleges, ten departments and more than 30 projects in chemical, biological, biomedical, materials, agricultural, soil and engineering sciences and also runs the in-house maintenance. Christopher has a primary role in bringing the scientific results from the CIF instrumentation to published completion. He has more than 50 publications that he has authored and co-authored with various faculties at the University. The publications are what drive the research grant acquisitions funding the research in the colleges, departments and principal investigators that the CIF serves.

Dr. Christopher Rithner is an invaluable asset to the Department of Chemistry and to the University as a whole. He has provided incredibly dedicated and distinguished service to all three of the University’s teaching, research and service missions for 24 years.