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Federal employee of the year ultimate example of teleworking

Paul Hsieh was nominated for a Service to America medal for his work in the aftermath of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last summer. Hsieh convinced federa...

Federal News Network Staff

September 16, 2011 10:50 am

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wfedstaff | June 4, 2015 11:10 am

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Each year, the Partnership for Public Service and a panel of high-powered judges pick a group of federal career managers as nominees for Service to America Medals.

The Sammies are among the most prestigious awards feds can receive. At Thursday night’s annual gala in Washington, the winners this year were announced. At the top of the heap stands the Federal Employee of the Year. Dr. Paul Hsieh, a research hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California.

Story continues below video by Partnership for Public Service.

Hsieh was nominated for his work in the aftermath of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last summer. Hsieh convinced federal officials that the containment cap on the ruptured deepwater oil well was working — helping to end the environmental disaster.

It turns out Hsieh’s expertise in studying groundwater gave him special insight into how oil flows through the ocean.

“The oil pressure in the well was so low that there was a great deal of worry that the well was leaking somewhere else and if the cap stayed on, the leak would break into the floor of the Gulf, creating a worse spill,” he said.

Hsieh’s analysis indicated it was safe to keep the cap on the well.For most of the oil spill, Hsieh worked near the spill site in Houston. However, toward the end, he had to return home, where he continued to test samples from USGS’s Menlo Park, Calif. offices.

The only catch was that there was no easy way to transmit the data, so a colleague snapped a picture of the data on a computer screen in Houston and sent it to him to analyze from a thousand miles away.