Rising Star: Travis S. Kelley
Travis Kelley ensures the health of the networks and systems that military medical providers and their patients rely on. During the pandemic, he helped develop methodologies to support the surge in employees who were working from home. He played a pivotal role in provisioning hundreds of laptops and telework-ready phones within 48 hours for the Global Network Operations Center, a help desk that supports 1,200 military hospitals, clinics and treatment facilities.
Kelly Godsey, the Defense Health Agency's chief operating officer, said Kelley often stayed up all night configuring laptops for distribution to employees. Godsey added that Kelley's advanced education in health care management and IT made him uniquely qualified "to think more strategically, especially for somebody at his grade level," and collaborate with industry partners and state officials in Texas, Georgia and Virginia to execute missions during the pandemic.
"He really operated at the strategic level," Godsey said. "He operated in a [public relations] role, getting other people to provide us the information that we needed. I'm not sure the program would have been even remotely as successful without his input and his ability to keep everything charging forward."