Courtney Stenson
Communications Lead

Courtney Stenson is a highly creative and strategic-thinking communications professional who can conceptualize and advance ideas. For more than fifteen years, she has demonstrated her ability to work with customers and partners to produce thoughtful, understandable, and memorable messages that resonate with target audiences. Currently, she leads communication for transforming and modernizing our business processes - also called enterprise resource planning (ERP). Previously she worked in the Energy and Environment Directorate, and before that worked in Computing and Information Technology as the communications manager focusing most of her efforts on large-scale, lab-wide projects (examples include: OneKey, Connected, Hub, Scout, the Publishing Summit, and TechFest). Her experience includes leading, developing, and launching important and strategic communication and marketing campaigns. She understands the importance of working in teams and networking across organizations to gather facts, opinions, and ideas to bring marketing ideas and communication goals to life.

In 2017 Courtney earned her PROSCI Change Management certificate to gain more knowledge about how people react to change and how communication strategies and messaging can help change be more successful to organizations or projects. She also received a PNNL Lab Director's Award Operational Excellence Award for her work on the OneKey project in 2018 and was nominated and selected by Communication and IT colleagues to receive the CIT Core Values Of the Year Award in 2020. In 2023 she received a Communications and External Affairs (CXE) Of the Year Award for her partnership on the Taking the Mystery Out Of Series, and in 2024 she received a CXE Of the Year award for her work on the Lab-wide WE are Safe launch.

Jamie Jo Berglund
Project Manager / Financial Coordinator

Jamie Berglund, a dynamic collaborator at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, she brings passion and ingenuity to every challenge she tackles. A proud member of a team awarded a patent—a day she describes as unforgettable—Jamie exemplifies the belief that success is a team effort.

Guided by her personal philosophy, “Think for yourself but not by yourself,” Jamie blends independence with collaboration, fostering an environment where creativity thrives. She inspires to be an Engineer one day and motivate others, “If you can think it, you can do it,” encouraging them to push boundaries and embrace possibility.

At the heart of Jamie’s work is a commitment to empowering others, a message she hopes to share with conference attendees: ANYONE can do this! Her approach proves that technology is for everyone, and with the right tools and mindset, barriers can be broken.

Jeannie Steiling
Division Administrator

Jeannie serves as the Division Administrator for Andrew Cowell, the Division Director of Research Computing within the Computing and Information Technology Directorate. In this dynamic role, she brings over a decade of administrative experience to provide essential support to both independent projects and the Leadership Team.

Karli Taxdahl
Community Affairs Consultant

Karli Taxdahl joined the lab in 2021, where she specializes in organizing conferences, workshops, symposiums, and other events within the Community Affairs and Protocol Office. Before joining the lab, Karli worked with the Department of Energy’s Richland Operations Office as a Training Coordinator, where she was responsible for organizing and implementing training programs across the organization. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Recreation, Tourism, and Event Management from Central Washington University.

Lisa Matson
Abstract Coordinator

Lisa Matson is the Division Administrative Coordinator supporting Research Computing with a goal of bringing a high level of organization and productivity thru calendar and task management as well as administrative work.

Before joining to PNNL, Lisa worked as an Executive Assistant at Premera Blue Cross where she was recognized many times with the Role Model award as a Force Multiplier while providing assistance to Executives, Vice Presidents, Directors, Managers and teams of Individual Contributors. She brings history in supporting Analysts and Actuaries, Human Resources, Payroll & Benefits, Provider Contracting, Operations and Finance.

Lisa has extensive experience in office coordination and a genuine passion for taking administrative tasks off peoples’ lists so they can focus on their priorities.

Phil George
Research Computing Ops Manager

Phil has been a part of TechFest planning since 2018. It is one the highlights of his work year. He loves seeing the excitement and energy that people have in sharing their amazing accomplishments, and finding people and solutions that will meet their project needs.

Russ Burtner
Human Centered Design and Innovation Group Lead

Russ Burtner is an Experience Advisor and Group Lead for the Human Centered Design and Innovation Group for Research Computing at Pacific Northwest national Laboratory. He has over 30 years’ experience in Human Computer Interaction, user research, software design and vision exploration. The focus of his research has been in collaborative analytic user experiences, natural user interfaces, immersive computing, and human-in-the-loop analysis of large, complex, multi-modal data. Past work experience includes extensive product development with Microsoft, Alki Software, Disney, and Oxygen Media. Current work areas for PNNL are in leading the Innovation Foundry, Improving the human experience through the SmartLabs initiative, operationalizing Generative AI and advancing Human Centered Design as a lab level capability. His research interests are in practicing and teaching an innovation discipline and developing and improving experiences for staff, user’s, and sponsors across the laboratory complex.

Tycko Franklin
Software Engineer and Team Lead

Tycko is a Software Engineer specializing in fullstack web application development and has worked at PNNL since 2017.

Tycko started working with programming in early 2000s, joining several hobby related projects. This led to an internship at a national forecasting company, working in the APL programming language. Tycko found his passion for web development in 2010 while working with web scrapers and customization scripts for existing websites.

During his time at PNNL Tycko has worked as a frontend developer, a backend developer, automated regression testing developer, continuous integration and continuous deployment architect, and an AWS architect and developer. Tycko learns from and helps fellow developers, and mentors interns and other junior staff.

Tycko leads development work on projects consisting of work from 25+ developers and subject matter experts, including both backend and frontend aspects of projects. On the frontend of web development, Tycko mainly works with Svelte (and some React) projects utilizing OpenLayers, ThreeJS, and D3 to provide visual explanations to complex geospatial data. On the backend Tycko works with AWS serverless first technology to provide scalable, secure, and robust applications.