Meet the 2026 Excellence Awards Recipients
The NAEM Excellence Awards showcase leaders whose outstanding environment, health and safety, and sustainability management achievements helped meet or exceed business objectives. Congratulations to the 2026 Excellence Awards recipients, who were honored during an awards luncheon at FORUM26 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
2026 Lifetime Achievement Award
This prestigious award honors one executive-level EHS & Sustainability leader whose vision and commitment have positively shaped the EHS & Sustainability fields within a corporate management role.
Stephanie Sparkman
Director of Environmental Compliance
QTS Data Centers
Stephanie is a visionary, results-oriented leader whose career reflects sustained contribution, leadership, and service to the EHS and sustainability profession.
Director of Environmental Compliance
QTS Data Centers
Stephanie is a visionary, results-oriented leader whose career reflects sustained contribution, leadership, and service to the EHS and sustainability profession.
Leadership-in-Action Awards
The Leadership-in-Action Awards recognize EHS and Sustainability leaders whose influence and commitment have elevated business management practices and the impact of EHS&S initiatives within organizations. Recipients were selected across five categories, including Empowering Systems, Championing Technology Innovation, Keeping Employees Safe, Advancing Corporate Transparency, and Minimizing the Corporate Footprint.
Empowering Systems
Elizabeth has built scalable, data-driven governance and compliance systems across complex portfolios, including a risk-based program supporting more than 5,000 Bank of America locations. Her work has strengthened regulatory governance, continuous improvement, and sustainability performance while also helping eliminate more than 400,000 single-occupancy vehicle trips through a long-running trip reduction compliance program.
Over more than 30 years, Alan has helped move ESG beyond compliance and disclosure toward business value, resilience, and measurable performance. His leadership integrates materiality, climate resilience, governance, metrics, and implementation into practical strategies that help organizations turn complex sustainability challenges into actionable business solutions.
Anna has helped transform sustainability into an enterprise-wide business capability, embedding it into strategy, risk management, customer engagement, and supply-chain resilience. Under her leadership, Tate & Lyle has reduced Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 17% from its 2019 baseline, exceeded its 2028 Forest, Land, and Agriculture emissions target four years early, and expanded regenerative agriculture efforts across approximately 1.5 million acres.
Jennifer modernized TVA's enterprise Environmental Management System, transforming decentralized practices into a cohesive, governance-driven framework aligned with ISO 14001 and Plan-Do-Check-Act principles. Her work strengthened accountability, leadership visibility, emergency preparedness, and continuous improvement across an organization serving more than 10 million people.
Championing Technology Innovation
As the architect of Microsoft's enterprise-wide Enablon program, Mary has helped create a unified source of EHS data, standardized global processes, enabled mobile-first workflows, and built a scalable digital foundation supporting Microsoft's expanding datacenter footprint. Her approach keeps the focus on safer workers, cleaner operations, stronger risk management, and better data.
Keeping Employees Safe
Kyle led the development and national expansion of Comcast's Safety Helmet Initiative. What began as a regional pilot became an enterprise-wide program that deployed more than 21,000 modern safety helmets to employees working in the field. Kyle brought together frontline employees, operations, EHS, supply chain, finance, procurement, and manufacturers to build a program rooted in employee feedback and data. The result is stronger head protection, standardized prevention practices, and a sustainable improvement in field safety.
Dr. Guillory created and implemented Zero is Possible, or ZIP, a citywide safety management system based on the ANSI/ASSP Z10 standard. Developed from his doctoral research, ZIP replaced fragmented and siloed approaches with a unified system focused on continuous improvement, employee engagement, training, and prevention. His leadership helped build a more transparent reporting culture and established meaningful leading indicators for safety participation and performance.
Minimizing the Corporate Footprint
Christian helped transform laboratory sustainability across Takeda's global operations. He led the expansion of the My Green Lab certification program from zero certified laboratories to a global initiative spanning 70 laboratories in 12 countries and engaging more than 1,500 employees. Every laboratory in the first two certification waves achieved certification, and 63% reached the highest Green level.
Helen has embedded sustainability into one of the most complex healthcare environments in the country. Since establishing Stanford Health Care's Sustainability Program Office, her leadership has helped achieve a 12.2% reduction in Energy Use Intensity, a 33.1% reduction in Landfill Waste Intensity, and a 53.8% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions, while generating approximately $6 million in cost savings.
Advancing Corporate Transparency
Alex has spent nearly two decades advancing the intersection of healthcare regulatory compliance, waste management, and sustainability. Her work includes creating educational programs, strengthening sustainable healthcare partnerships, developing waste-reporting frameworks aligned with Joint Commission sustainability efforts, and leading a national cross-functional manifest taskforce affecting tens of thousands of hazardous-material shipping documents each year.
Martha has more than 40 years of leadership in EHS, sustainability, and product stewardship. At Amphenol, she transformed Responsible Business Alliance and ESG performance from a reactive customer requirement into a proactive global management system. Her work has strengthened training, audit performance, corrective-action tracking, supplier accountability, and employee protections across a highly decentralized global organization.
Nexgen Leader Awards
These awards recognize rising EHS and Sustainability managers who possess the talent and skills required for the next generation of leaders.
Minimizing the Corporate Footprint
Ayse has demonstrated an exceptional ability to build sustainability capability across a global manufacturing network while delivering clear environmental and financial results. Her leadership in Sustainability Gembas, Energy Treasure Hunts, knowledge-sharing programs, renewable energy, greenhouse gas reduction, and Zero Waste to Landfill has created a model of practical, collaborative, high-impact sustainability leadership.
Championing Technology Innovation
In just six years in the profession, Maxime has helped modernize Netflix's global EHS technology, data governance, and risk-management systems. His work includes establishing an EHS Data Governance Policy, building global KPIs, improving incident trend visibility, modernizing ergonomics, developing supplier risk assessment, and championing responsible generative AI use cases for regulatory and risk applications.