Staff Excellence Award in the Category for outstanding Customer Service went to Mark Lutz, accompanied by thunderous applause.
- The job of facilities management is a thankless one as much of the time as staff are called out when things have broken or gone wrong. This staff member handles difficult issues with great professionalism and care.
- While many of us on campus have benefitted from his wonderful work ethic, one particular Faculty member articulated it perfectly, his comments:
- “ My lab is at Castle in Atwater, and every summer the HVAC units cooling the lab fail, often several times per season over weekends, holidays, and late at night. Every single time, he rushes out to Castle, no matter how late, to help us open doors, set up fans, call service technicians, or reboot the units himself. Without this above-and-beyond sense of duty from he, our irreplaceable instruments would have suffered heat-related damage many times by now.
- He was a shining example of excellence is during a recent summer, when he took a well-deserved vacation, during which there was a major HVAC failure over a very hot weekend. By the time we realized that the HVAC was down, it was 6:15 pm and the lab and a room housing a $1,000,000 superconducting magnet were already reaching 90 degrees. I called around phone numbers of each person I could think of that could help, but nobody answered. Finally, out of desperation, I called him, and he rushed out **in minutes** to get the HVAC back on line.”
- I want to emphasize that he single-handedly saves us from many such disasters every year. We published two research papers in the highly prestigious journal Science on research carried out at Castle, and they would not have been possible without his tremendous dedication to UC Merced.
