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2022 Infrastructure Masons Award Ceremony

Over 200 iMasons’ members from around the globe gathered together on the night of October 19th at the Natural History Museum in London to celebrate leaders of the digital infrastructure industry.

Hosted by Dean Nelson, Founder and Chair of iMasons, and Amber Caramella, Advisory Council Member, Global Executive Sponsor for IM Women, this night was a smashing success, recognizing the outstanding contributions of leaders in the digital infrastructure industry. 

The night began with a warm welcome from our main event sponsor Schneider Electric’s  Pasha Ponomarev and a thoughtful reminder that data centers are theheart of the digital transformation underway today, and we need to evolve our industry into an undisputed sustainability leader.

At Schneider Electric, they have a vision of a sustainable future for the digital infrastructure industry, and iMasons is proud to provide the forum to collaborate as an industry to achieve it.  Thank you to Schneider for their instrumental support in the 2022 Awards Ceremony.

The iMasons awards program showcases and amplifies the outstanding contributions of leaders in the digital infrastructure industry who have led by example and achieved tangible and sustained results.

The 2022 Award Categories were as follows:

Diversity and Inclusion Champion
Education Champion
Technology Champion
IM100
Luminary Award
+ new Emerging Talent

Let’s meet the 2022 winners!

Sustainability Champion

A massive thank you to our presenting Sustainability Award partner, Meta, and the Award Sponsor, Cumulus Data.

The sustainability champion was awarded to Brian Janous of Microsoft. Brian Janous is responsible for leading the development and execution of Microsoft’s global data center energy strategy. These data centers provide the foundational cloud infrastructure for over 200 Microsoft online and cloud services for consumers and businesses worldwide. Brian has led Microsoft to be innovative and bold in the pursuit for the highest sustainability with its data centers. As one of the largest hyperscalers with data centers around the world,

Microsoft is paving the way for other data centers and co-locations in the industry to work towards renewable Natural Gas Microgrids to ensure net-zero carbon and drive towards decarbonization. Brian’s leadership in this endeavor helps Microsoft take a step toward their goal of eliminating dependence on petroleum-based diesel, while increasing the resilience of their data centers and providing a much-needed capacity resource to the local grid.

Congratulations, Brian!

Diversity and Inclusion Champion

Thank you to our presenting Education Award partner, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the Award Sponsor, Pure Data Centres Group.

The 2022 Diversity and Inclusion Champion was awarded to Dawn Childs of PURE DC.

Dawn’s significant and inspirational achievements include her work as the longest serving President of the Women’s Engineering Society (WES), a charity and a professional network of women engineers, scientists and technologists offering inspiration, support and professional development. Since her involvement with WES, the representation of women in engineering in the UK has increased from 9% to 14% and is now achieving as much growth per year as was previously seen in a decade through the 80s and 90s. Dawn recently was appointed Chair of iMasons Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

Congratulations, Dawn!

Technology Champion

A massive thank you to our presenting Technology Award partner, Google, and the  Award Sponsor, Metro Edge

The 2022 Technology Champion was given to Lex Coors of Interxion HQ

Over the past 30 years of his career, Lex Coors has built exceptionally strong credentials in the design of
versatile, cost-effective and energy-efficient data center infrastructure. He has supervised the design and
build process for more than 70 data centers and developed close to 600,000m2 of gross space with over 300,000 m² net space across western Europe and Africa.

In his current role as Chief Datacenter Technology and Engineering Officer at Digital Realty, Lex has
pioneered several new approaches to data center design and management, including the improvement
of power ratio efficiency between server load and transformer load, and the industry’s first-ever modular approach to data center architecture.

Congratulations, Lex!

Education Champion

A massive thank you to our presenting Education Award partner, Microsoft, and the  Award Sponsor, Digital Realty.

The 2022 Education Champion is Thomas (TJ) Ciccone of Stack Infrastructure

TJ Ciccone led and took part in several initiatives reflecting his commitment to investing in, and positively impact the data center community. However, his most significant contribution comes from his involvement with Northern Virginia Community College. In September 2018, the college launched the first-ever two-year degree program designed specifically for data center operators in the state of Virginia. It’s an ideal program for a state now known as “the home of the internet” and is the only fully college-accredited coursework in the data center business.

As part of this initiative, Ciccone located critical program resources for the college, developed the entire curriculum, and served as a liaison between the college and their third-party contractor on building a mini data center lab on the Loudoun campus. Many of his students have gone on to work full-time in data centers.

Congratulations, TJ!

Luminary Awards

At the 2022 Awards, we inducted two new Luminary Award recipients into the iMasons Hall of Fame. 

Lee Kirby

Lee Kirby of Salute Mission Critical is instrumental in advocating for veterans and finding them their first step into civilian life.

Lee’s done exceptional work improving the performance of critical infrastructure through sustainable solutions that reduce operating costs and drive industry trends. He served as President of The Uptime Institute, one of the premiere organizations in this industry, improving uptime, and reducing costs of the infrastructure we all rely on. His current passion is introducing military veterans and their families to our industry, providing them a path to a good career and helping ease the talent crisis in our industry.

Simon Allen

A second Luminary was announced as a surprise on the night to the one and only Simon Allen. In the remainder of 2022, Simon Allen will step down as iMasons Executive Director. For the past 5 years, Simon has lived and breathed our work across Education, Diversity and Inclusion, Sustainability, and Technology. He is the ultimate iMasons ambassador uniting people and companies to better our industry. The majority of our events, including this one, have happened because of his vision, leadership, and tireless execution. 

IM100

At the 2022 Awards Ceremony, we inducted the next generation of the IM100.

The IM100 Awards recognize and celebrate the 100 individuals contributing to the digital infrastructure industry in meaningful and measurable ways. As we look to inspire our future generation to pursue technical careers, we recognize those individuals making a difference in digital infrastructure. 

Emerging Talent

The Emerging Talent is a new award introduced at the iMasons Award Ceremony when the team decided there was a key part of our industry that was missing the recognition they so rightly deserved.

The iMasons Emerging Talent Award is given to young professionals showing promise in the digital infrastructure industry. These young professionals are standouts in their field and are the next leaders of the industry.

In addition to celebrating the champions of our industry, we also continued our mission of giving back by raising funds for our $1M Education Challenge to support iMasons scholarships!

We’re proud to announce that we exceeded our 1$ million dollar goal for iMasons Scholarships!

During the award show, with the help of the Hyperscalers and the incredible audience members, we’re proud to shared we raised over $160,000 to achieve our $1 Million goal for Scholarships! Thank you to everyone who donated, making education more accessible for students around the world.

If you’d like to donate to our Education fund, you can do so here. Donations of any amount are accepted, but as a reminder, donations of $2500 or greater receive an Education Champion medal. Thank you for making a difference in students lives!

That’s a wrap on the 2022 Infrastructure Masons Awards. We’re proud to support the digital infrastructure community and we look forward to recognizing next years champions at the 2023 awards. If you’d like to view and download photos from the event for personal use, you can do so here.

Watch the full award show:

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