Top leaders are important, but it’s the rank-and-file talent that truly drives innovation in government. The Rising Star awards recognize those outstanding early-career individuals who are doing great things today — and who are likely to be filling the senior slots tomorrow. Congratulations to this year's winners:

• Arvin Baroni
  Senior Product Manager, Product Lifecycle Management
  NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Katie Boeckl
  Privacy Risk Strategist
  National Institute of Standards and Technology
• Liz Dean
  Senior UX Strategist
  MetroStar Systems
• Kelsey Werder Monaghan
  Federal Account Manager, Department of Energy & NASA
  Dell Technologies
• Jamie Mullaney
  Manager
  Jefferson Consulting Group
• George Nicol
  Program Specialist, Solutions for Enterprise Wide Procurement
  NASA
• Meikle Paschal Jr.
  Robotic Process Automation Product Owner
  U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
• Nicholas Shields
  Research Analyst/Data Scientist
  Department of the Air Force
• Douglas Smith
  Project Manager, FEDSIM
  General Services Administration
• Kevin Smith
  Vice President
  C2S Consulting Group
• Sherri Sokol
  Innovation Lead
  Defense Information Systems Agency
• Ashley Strickland
  CACI Agile Solution Factory Growth & Communications Lead
  CACI

Profiles for each winner will be published in early November.