Congratulations to Neil Devadasan, the Polis Center’s recipient of the Luddy Award of Excellence. Neil received the award at a banquet on February 18 for his innovative and significant contributions in creating and using informatics for community good, acquiring and applying new knowledge, and advancing the field.

Polis Center work often pushes technology boundaries as we mesh spatial technologies with informatics, computer science, business methods, and multiple domains. This has been possible for the past 30 years because of Neil’s creative mind and constant research. Neil understands and has contributed to our vision and is constantly scoping out new technology and methods to make vision a reality. If we can envision it, he can make it happen, often inventing new approaches and methods.

He leads the information systems team and is our systems engineer. He engineered SAVI, one of the nation’s premier community information systems. The earliest expression of its online mapping system was one of the first, pushing the technology beyond even what the software developers had envisioned. Most recently, Neil engineered the digital Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, one of the most sophisticated encyclopedias of its kind, to address our center’s long-held desire to create a resource that manages information about places and their history, statistics about their demographics, their prominent people, and events in a new and engaging way.

Neil is a great leader, collaborative, and motivating, and he reflects our center’s values in all he does. Thank you, Neil!