This year's recipient of the LPL Staff Excellence Award is Keara Burke, Image Processing Engineer with the OSIRIS-REx mission. Keara began working with OSIRIS-REx as an undergraduate on a project that had her counting rocks. In 2019, after completing her degree in Systems Engineering, she went on to co-lead the OSIRIS-REx site-selection campaign's boulder counting effort, tallying more than 30,000 boulders over the course of the mission. This meant long hours of tedious analysis and some 60-hour work weeks due to staffing shortages.

In addition to nominal job duties, Keara regularly takes on special projects such as taking the lead on a now-published article that synthesized the OSIRIS-REx boulder-counting results. Over the past year, she has supported several large-scale proposal efforts and pitched in on high-value proposal development. Beginning in 2020, Keara has worked primarily as a systems engineer within LPL's spaceflight seismometer program, SIIOS PSTAR. In that role, Keara is responsible for generating, tracking, and verifying instrument requirements by reviewing design and test documentation for spaceflight seismic sensors.

Keara is an extraordinary engineer who has already made outstanding contributions to LPL and UArizona. The skills and experience she has cultivated will continue to play an important role in the future of research and exploration at LPL.