Honoring the Energy That Elevates Us: Congratulations to Sara Vannah

Some people bring skill to their work. Others bring commitment. But every so often, we have the privilege of working alongside someone who brings something even more powerful: energy that inspires, motivates, and pushes an entire organization forward. Sara Vannah is a recent recipient of the JANUS Energy Award.

The Energy Award recognizes those employees who consistently go above and beyond to spark progress and deliver results. Whether through identifying new business opportunities, contributing to winning proposals, or elevating customer experiences, recipients demonstrate a rare combination of drive, insight, and positivity.

Sara Vannah has done exactly that. Her enthusiasm is contagious, her work ethic, unwavering. She has contributed to key opportunities, written published peer-reviewed articles, strengthened JANUS' presence within the scientific community, and provided exceptional support across the organization. Simply put, she makes everyone around her better.

In 2025, Sara Vannah was first-author on two peer-reviewed articles. The first, published in Entropy, introduced an informational-entropic metric that makes use of the spectrum of an exoplanet to directly quantify how Earth-like the planet is. The second, published in Atmospheric Measurement Techniques, demonstrated that Global Navigation Satellite System radio occultation (GNSS RO) performance in the planetary boundary layer is strongly dependent on retrieval algorithms and quantified the biases of these retrievals in different regions. Sara has submitted an NSF proposal to follow up on this work and reduce these biases.

This high number of successful peer-reviewed publications in a single year is key to the satisfaction of our federal science program managers and helps burnish the reputation of JANUS with the scientific community.

At JANUS, we talk often about our mission: performing challenging work that matters most to our nation and delivering lasting solutions. But that mission is only possible because of people like Sara Vannah whose energy helps transform ideas into results. Today, we proudly celebrate her achievements—and the spirit she brings to our organization.

Thank you, Sara Vannah, for being a driving force at JANUS.