ISA has announced the 2025 ISA Celebrating Excellence award recipients. This program formally showcases and celebrates the remarkable achievements and contributions of ISA members, partners and other automation industry professionals. This year’s awardees will be honored at the ISA Honors and Awards Gala as part of the Automation Summit and Expo to be held 5-7 October 2025 in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. The 2025 award for Enduring Society Service goes to Carlos Mandolesi. Carlos was ISA president in 2022, but his service to the society started long before and continues today.
He is an enthusiastic champion of the automation industry and has helped create programs that educate, inspire and support automation professionals worldwide. Here are a few highlights. Mandolesi helped ISA create International Automation Professionals Day, held annually in April and celebrated online via #IAPD or #AutomationProDay . The digital event engages automation professionals from all around the globe to recognize their efforts in the vastly growing automation industry. Mandolesi said, “It is very common that our friends, relatives and population in general do not understand what we do when we say that we work with automation.
It is important to have our own date to celebrate and promote the automation profession. ISA, as the home of automation, is the perfect organization to create it.” Mandolesi also focuses on the future to help ISA members stay on top of emerging topics. In September 2020, he was instrumental in establishing ISA’s Smart Manufacturing and IIoT (SMIIoT) division along with Sujata Tilak, currently an ISA executive board member.
Soon the largest and fastest-growing division in ISA, SMIIoT encompassed eight aspects of smart manufacturing: Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), cloud technologies, artificial intelligence and machine learning, communication and networking (industrial Internet), cybersecurity, cyber-physical systems, digital twin and simulation and virtualization technologies, including virtual reality and augmented reality. When ISA reorganized its governing structure late last year to remove division designations, the importance of those and other topics did not diminish. Mandolesi became ISA’s Technical Assembly Chair and ISA announced a new way for members to exchange ideas and build expertise: technical communities called Connect Forums.
Connect Forums are hosted on ISA Connect , ISA’s members-only online community and discussion board. They cover key ISA technical content topics , allowing ISA members to engage with automation professionals across sectors, discuss cutting-edge automation topics and get real-time answers to their toughest questions. Said Mandolesi, “As ISA members directly connect across sectors, we will learn, share our expertise and grow as professionals for the duration of our careers. Connect Forums are an invaluable benefit to ISA membership that you can’t get anywhere else.”
Additional 2025 honorees
A number of other individuals will be recognized in October for their contributions and achievements. They include Edson da Costa Bortoni for excellence in education; Hector Puyosa for excellence in mentoring; Sarah Fluchs for excellent work on standards; and Xiaowei Yue for excellence in technical achievement. ISA geographic sections being recognized for excellence include the Bangalore section, the Nigeria section and the Spain section. Sagacity Allstream Fabrication Engineering is being honored for excellence in corporate technical innovation. ISA volunteers of the year include Greg Potter, Jane Buchanan, Jose Bielza, Olawale Akande and Vaibhav Subhash Narkar.
ISA student volunteers of the year are Atharva Joshi, Julia Feijoo and Lucia Freire. This news item originally appeared in the August/September issue of Automation.com Monthly.
