Operational Excellence: POTUS Honors 6 Extraordinary DOC Scientists

President Obama today named 106 researchers as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. The winners will receive their awards at a Washington, DC ceremony this spring. The six award recipients from the Department of Commerce work at NOAA and NIST.

In 2016, what issues will keep the C-suite in health care organizations up at night? One common thread among those issues will most certainly relate to their own workforce, namely, physicians.

Based on your feedback, we re-engineered the site with the theme of "At Your Service." We've made big changes to help you more quickly and easily find the NOAA news, data and information you've come to expect. We've also made it easier to explore the breadth of NOAA's 9 focus areas. This is just the first phase of a long-term effort to unify NOAA's web properties with a more modern look and functionality.

NCCOS’s Center for Coastal Environmental Health and Biomolecular Research (CCEHBR) recently began its 26th year of volunteering in PalmettoPride’s Adopt-A-Highway program, an effort to fight litter and help beautify South Carolina. Over the past 25 years, the hard work of CCEHBR volunteers has produced 1,115 30-gallon bags of trash, weighing a grand total of 8.4 tons.

Meet Derrick and Jessica Snowden, a married couple who work at NOAA's U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (U.S. IOOS®). Derrick is chief of the U.S. IOOS Operations Division, Jessica is a physical scientist in the IOOS Regions, Budget, and Policy Division.

(by Christine Schaefer) We often feature Baldrige Award recipients in blogs here because these national role models can provide inspiration and best practices for other organizations. Today I’m highlighting 25 additional U.S. organizations that have recently demonstrated high performance that may lead them to earn Baldrige Awards in the future.

On February 11, 2016, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker delivered a J. Ira Harris Lecture, hosted by the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Secretary Pritzker’s lecture highlighted the goals she set out to accomplish after accepting the position of Secretary of Commerce and how the Department of Commerce has been revitalized to meet the needs of the 21st century economy through its Open for Business agenda. Secretary Pritzker also discussed one of the most important aspects of the Commerce Department mission, commercial diplomacy, which is using America’s commercial power to influence policy in markets around the world.