The University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business is seeking nominations for the schools 2006 Smith Leadership and Excellence Awards. The annual awards, which pay tribute to business leaders and organizations that have made a significant and positive impact in the mid-Atlantic region, will be presented in four categories: Business Excellence, Leaders for the Digital Economy, Leadership Excellence, and Public Excellence.

For the past two years eSmith has been evolving into a comprehensive gateway that allows students, faculty, and staff to navigate through a network of public and private information, services, and business functions of the Smith School and the University of Maryland. The internal portal provides a secure infrastructure to present Web-based applications and information to the Smith community, focusing on tools for collaboration, research, and personal productivity.

For Dan Robillard, community has always been important. After working in the U.S. Navy for eight years, Robillard was looking for a community to call his own as he transitioned back to private life. And while pursuing an online MBA at the Smith School of Business, that’s exactly what he found. “There was this community of veterans that really helped each other out,” Robillard says. “It was an environment that I wanted to be a part of.”

As a systems engineer, math major, nuclear reactor operator and mother of two small children, there isn’t much that Kenyetta Barnes fears. Except, she laughs, quantitative subjects, like accounting and finance, despite her strong math background. “Accounting and math are completely different,” she says. “I always had this fear of those types of classes.”