We are pleased to share that during OSCON 2015 last week, Marina Zhurakhinskaya, senior outreach specialist at Red Hat, was recognized for her contributions to the open source community with a 2015 O'Reilly Open Source Award. The O’Reilly Open Source Awards recognize five individual contributors annually who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity and collaboration in the development of open source software.

Marina has been a Red Hatter since 2006 working as a senior software engineer for the online services team and as community engagement lead on the desktop team. Recently, Marina joined the Employment Branding and Communications Outreach team as a senior outreach specialist focused on community diversity and inclusion. She co-organizes Outreachy, formerly Outreach Program for Women, a mentorship and internships program that helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved.

In addition to her work at Red Hat, Marina is also a board member and advisor for the Ada Initiative and recently completed two terms as a board member, including one term as vice president, for the GNOME Foundation. In 2012, she won the GNOME Foundation Contributor of the Year Award "the Pants” for her work with Outreachy and GNOME Shell development. In 2014, she and Karen Sandler, executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy, received the Free Software Foundation Award for Projects of Social Benefit with Outreachy.

On behalf of Red Hatters around the globe, congratulations Marina!