Two MITRE Employees Receive Black Engineer of the Year Awards

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

MCLEAN, Va., February 22, 2010 — The MITRE Corporation is pleased to announce that Joel Hypolite and Charles Worrell, Ph.D., were named Black Engineer of the Year Award (BEYA) winners at the 2010 BEYA Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Global Competitiveness Conference, held in Baltimore from February 18-20. Hypolite received a Modern Day Technology Leader Award and Worrell received a Special Recognition Award.

A national awards program, BEYA was established in 1986 to recognize African-Americans who demonstrate excellence in engineering or science and leadership in the workplace and in the community.

"On a daily basis, Joel and Charles contribute their technical and research expertise to issues of significant national importance," said Lisa Bender, Ph.D., vice president and chief human resources officer at MITRE. "They also take time to share their talents with the community and have served the country through military service. They go the extra mile, and that makes them stand apart."

Joel Hypolite

Hypolite, a senior information security engineer and scientist and an expert in computer security, was recognized by BEYA as "someone who is shaping the future of engineering, science, and technology." He is principal investigator of the Detecting Malicious Activity in Cross Boundary Communications project, which is part of MITRE's internal research and development program. His research is focused on developing new techniques to detect cyber attacks and investigating how cyber adversaries use botnets. Malicious botnets are networks of compromised computers controlled remotely to steal sensitive data, send spam emails, launch denial-of-service attacks, and conduct other nefarious activities.

His earlier work at MITRE included leading technical development within MITRE's Cross Boundary Information Sharing Laboratory, providing security engineering and cross domain solution support for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and supporting source code analysis for the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Energy. Prior to joining MITRE in 2004, he was a captain in the U.S. Air Force, where he led the unit responsible for operating and maintaining mission systems supporting the United States Atomic Energy Detection System and the United States National Data Center.

Hypolite has served as a volunteer firefighter and as a member of the Civil Air Patrol. He holds a master's degree in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Notre Dame.

Charles Worrell

Worrell is a principal scientist and an acting chief engineer in MITRE's Center for Enterprise Modernization, the federally funded research and development center sponsored by the IRS and cosponsored by the Department of Veterans Affairs that MITRE manages. His work focuses on deriving critical information from financial data. He leads research efforts to develop advanced analytic techniques in support of financial fraud detection, event detection, and organizational change efforts at several government agencies. An expert in Bayesian inference modeling (a statistical technique in which evidence or observations are used to infer the probability that a hypothesis may be true), he served as chief modeler on a team that developed automated tools to help government agencies detect the outbreak of infectious diseases overseas. He is the inventor of a patent-pending method developed to help MITRE's government customers predict how people will respond to organizational change. BEYA recognized Worrell as an individual "whose accomplishments distinguish him far beyond his discipline and whose work has a broad impact and value to society."

With MITRE since 2005, Worrell was previously director of Systems Development at the American Automobile Association's Response Services Center. He spent a decade as a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy.

A native of Harlem in New York City, Worrell grew up in public housing and received a Navy ROTC scholarship. He volunteers at the Annapolis Maritime Museum and the Eastport Community Center, where he leads job-search skills and SAT preparation workshops for at-risk young men. He also serves on the board of directors of the St. Philip's Family Life Center, which sponsors programs for low-income children and elderly residents of public housing in Annapolis. He holds a doctorate in information technology from George Mason University and a master's degree in telecommunications systems management from the Naval Postgraduate School. He earned a bachelor's degree in regional science from the University of Pennsylvania.

About The MITRE Corporation

The MITRE Corporation (www.mitre.org) is a not-for-profit organization that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government. It operates federally funded research and development centers for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Homeland Security, with principal locations in Bedford, Mass., and McLean, Va.

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