Chancellor’s 2013 Employee of the Year Award recognizes staff excellence

George Ballinger, Martha Shernick, Larry Drees, Jennifer Law, and David Kalahar recently were honored as the 2013 Chancellor’s Employees of the Year by the Boulder Campus Staff Council. The five received recognition during halftime at a CU women’s basketball game.

Ballinger is director of both parent relations and veteran services. He served for more than 27 years in the United States Air Force before joining CU. Families often describe him as a lifeline, a fountain of encouragement and guidance. Three years ago, he took on the daunting task of converting the CU Parents Association Board of Directors to a Parents Council. The Parents Council was successfully launched this year. Ballinger also built an office and advocacy center for CU’s increasing number of veterans and active military. He’s a leader on the campus in advocating, organizing and coordinating support services for student veterans.

Drees is the Buff OneCard program director and assistant director of housing and dining services IT, and oversees the IT support desk and the access services groups. He managed and implemented a project to wire residence hall rooms with a high-speed infrastructure. He often goes out of his way to help departments and serves on a variety of committees. His day-to-day duties include leading an IT support team responsible for more than 600 housing and dining services employees and their 150 laptops, as well as 100 plus mobile devices. For 27 years, he has been committed to improving and supporting the security of CU-Boulder students by working with room keys and Buff Cards. In 2006 he oversaw the transition from one card system to another, and this year, he implemented new smart-card technology.

Kalahar is the adviser and logistics coordinator for CU’s Technological Arts and Media Program. He is the sole adviser for this quickly growing program, which began with only 200 students in 2006 and now is home to nearly 700 students with some of the most diverse majors and backgrounds on campus. His colleagues describe him as the heart of TAM. He is the face students see as they enter the program and the attentive listener for any and all problems they encounter. He’s also the person who shakes hands with students as they walk across the stage during graduation. While Kalahar is known by many as a friend and mentor, he has also earned a title as the go-to chef in TAM. On his own time and money, he cooks up pots of chili and batches of his famous meatballs for each student registration open house.

Law is the manager of operations for the integrative physiology department. She started with the department in 2000 as an accounting technician and worked with payroll and finance. Since then, she’s had her hand on a little bit of everything: numerous budget operations, faculty recruitment and hiring, new employee training, among other projects. She played a vital role in the recent reorganization of the integrative physiology department. New faculty from evolutionary, population, and organismic biology were transferred into integrative physiology, and she made the transition seamless. In recent years, the department grew from 800 students to more than 2,000, and Law managed this unprecedented growth and kept the entire department running smoothly, even through difficult financial times.

Shernick is the program coordinator for the Sewall Residential Academic Program. The job of a program coordinator includes organizing new-student orientations, balancing student and faculty schedules, and organizing events, trips and conferences. She has become a parent to 400 nervous, new students. Her impact on the students at Sewall has been so profound, she remains a significant figure in their lives, even years after they move out. Shernick is committed to the staff and faculty members teaching at Sewall as well. Her remarkable ability to connect with the Sewall community doesn’t stop with the students and staff. She also reached out to dining hall and custodial members. She enrolled in Spanish classes to better communicate with the Spanish-speaking custodial members and worked personally with immigrant staff to help them study for citizenship tests. On her own dime, she bought a “citizenship cake” for staff members who gained citizenship.