The Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce honored the winners of its fifth annual Technology Leaders of the Year Awards on Apr. 19 at Jungle Island. The awards luncheon recognized individuals and organizations with extraordinary technological hands-on experience whose management of technology resources and/or technological innovations have made outstanding contributions to their organization and the community.
The winners are (by category):
Technology Executive — Juan Diego Calle, founder and CEO of .CO Internet SAS, the registry operator for the .CO toplevel domain. .CO was launched internationally in July 2010, and has become one of the most successful domain registries in history, with more than 600,000 domain names registered by people and companies in 200 countries.
Technology Company — Accelogic LLC founded in 2005, spun-off from a Bell Labs research program started in 1997. Located in Weston, Accelogic has been for the past few years at the forefront of the High-Performance Computing Industry, becoming recognized worldwide as the pioneer in the design of ultra-efficient algorithms, which have rendered the fastest mathematical libraries known today.
Technology Entrepreneur — Dr. Ronald DeMeo MD, MBA, Radiation Shield Technologies, is a noted surgeon, scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor. In the 1990s, he identified a need to better protect healthcare workers and patients from radiation. He created Demron, a unique fabric that blocks radiation. Dr. DeMeo and RST are considered world leaders in providing multi-hazard protective clothing to medical personnel, first responders and military from chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats and heat stress.
Bioscience Company — Beckman Coulter has 12,000 employees that develop, manufacture and market products that simplify, automate and innovate complex biomedical testing. These diagnostic systems are found in hospitals and other critical care settings around the world and produce information used by physicians to diagnose disease, make treatment decisions and monitor patients.
Top Technology Student — Britnie Allen, Miami Dade College, and Jairo Pava, Florida International University.
Allen attended Miami Central Senior High School as a member of the Academy of Information Technology magnet program. Through hard work she became the president of the ITGirls Club and valedictorian of her high school graduating class in 2009. In the summer of 2009, Britnie was chosen to intern at the Burger King Corporation. Now a sophomore at Miami Dade College, she is studying Computer Information Systems.
Pava is an undergraduate senior and will graduate with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. He has co-authored and published four peer-reviewed conference papers, an extremely unusual accomplishment for an undergraduate student. He also is writing a chapter for a scientific book series published by Springer Verlag, a renowned publisher in Computer Science.
WPBT’s Nightly Business Report anchor Tom Hudson served as emcee of the awards program that featured a keynote presentation by Rodney Atkins, senior vice president of IBM Systems and Technology.
