Association recognizes seven executives

The Senior Executives Association on Monday announced seven career federal executives as winners of the association's 1998 Executive Excellence Awards.

Four executives will receive the Distinguished Executive Service Award for outstanding performance and dedication to public service throughout their federal careers:

• Donald Bailey, executive director of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in Charleston, S.C., for spearheading the consolidation of four East coast naval engineering centers and for his significant contributions to the development of "silent" submarine detection technology.
• Ronald Bettauer, assistant legal adviser for international claims and investment disputes at the State Department, for his outstanding work pursuing international claims on behalf of the United States and its citizens for more than a decade.
• Thomas Pickard, assistant director of the FBI's criminal investigative division, for dedicating a career to fighting crime and terrorism, including working on such cases as the World Trade Center bombing in New York City and the crash of TWA flight 800.
• Dr. John Sirmalis, technical director of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I., for his visionary leadership and technical direction, which have secured the Navy's position as the leader in undersea warfare.

Three executives will receive the Executive Achievement Award, which recognizes career executives for special achievements that significantly improved the efficiency and effectiveness of a federal program:

• Scott Charney, chief of the computer crime and intellectual property section of the Justice Department's criminal division, for leading the department's fight against high-tech crimes, such as economic espionage, computer hacking and technological copyright infringement.
• Louis Marquet, director of the Research, Development and Engineering Center at the Army's Communications-Electronics Command in Fort Monmouth, N.J., for his extensive work developing land mine awareness education programs for children, and detection technologies for U.S. troops, in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
• Dr. Louis Miller, chief of the laboratory of parasitic diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for his intense work on developing a vaccine for malaria, a deadly disease that kills more than two million people a year worldwide.

The association's professional development league will honor the executives at a National Press Club ceremony on Dec. 3. Candidates were nominated by the heads of their agencies.