ITS proudly recognizes Research Computing Facilitator Bart Kats as the January 2025 Employee of the Month. Bart was nominated by Dalia Fadel for his invaluable contributions to the Google Workspace project and his commitment to supporting the UCR community through a major change.

Bart is a valued member of the project team who consistently demonstrated initiative and problem-solving skills. He showed his dedication to serving the UCR community by finding ways to minimize the impact of the Google Workspace storage quota reductions on faculty, staff, students, alumni, and former students. 

“Bart has been an invaluable member [of] our Google Workspace project team. Throughout the project, Bart has demonstrated outstanding initiative, problem solving skills, and a dedication to ensuring our faculty do not get impacted by the quota reductions,” Dalia shared. 

Throughout the project, Bart worked closely with colleagues from ITS and campus partners to ensure that changes were handled smoothly. He played a key role in analyzing storage usage, creating detailed visualizations and simulations, and providing the data that helped guide important decisions on quota allocation. Bart’s focus on customer needs helped the team find solutions that met pooled storage requirements while supporting faculty, staff, and students.

Bart went above and beyond in proactively developing innovative solutions to roadblocks that the project team encountered. He automated the process of auditing over 18,000 shared drives, streamlining the evaluation process for potential drive deletion. He also developed a mail merge solution that allowed the project team to send personalized messages to more than 5,000 users, ensuring clear communication and support during the transition. 

In her nomination, Dalia shared more about Bart’s contribution to the project:

“Change as pertains to quota reductions can have a huge impact on faculty and researchers. Bart’s data analysis of faculty, staff, [student], alumni, and former student data gave us the information needed to determine the quotas for each group that would allow us to meet our quota reduction goals while having the least impact on [these groups].

[Bart also] demonstrated remarkable passion for protecting faculty interests during storage quota reductions while finding other ways to reduce storage.”

Bart’s commitment to teamwork and effective change management was crucial in helping the project meet its goals while minimizing disruptions. His technical expertise, willingness to take on challenges, and focus on helping others made a positive and lasting impact on the UCR community. 

Thank you, Bart, for your commitment to serving the UCR community and supporting the campus’ transition to new storage quotas. Congratulations on this well-deserved recognition! 

Do you have colleagues who deserve recognition for their hard work and dedication? Nominate them for one of ITS’ Employee Recognition Programs!

Staff members can be nominated for Employee of the Month or Team of the Quarter. Use our form to submit your nomination for the next Employee of the Month.