CORTEK - Key Persons
David serves the EMKS Board of Directors and acts as Special Advisor to the President and Executive Vice President. In his former role as Chief Operating Officer, it was his leadership, strategic planning, technical acumen, and expertise in program operations that was key to the company's growth and positioning.
Job Titles:
- Director of Operations
- Director of Operations for EMKS
As the Director of Operations for EMKS, Devin provides support to human resources, recruiting, project management, quality management, and project control by reinforcing their efforts. His primary focus is empowering functional managers to overcome any obstacles that may negatively impact their success by enabling them to effectively and efficiently do their job. Devin's contributions to leadership, strategic planning, daily operations, and project management are key to the company's growth and success.
As the President of EMKS, Ed provides executive leadership by guiding the company's strategic direction and focusing on the corporate mission, operations, and capabilities as well as the acceleration of growth objectives. Ed helps EMKS achieve operational objectives through contributing to strategic plans, leading the company's growth initiatives, managing senior-level customer relationships, overseeing delivery of solutions, and ensuring execution of promises to clients, partners and employees alike. With over 30 years of proven leadership experience, Ed successfully managed major challenges in IT operations in both the commercial and government sectors.
Before becoming President of EMKS, Ed served in a number of executive leadership roles, including CEO of Avetus, LLC, CEO of Enteresys Corporation, COO of EMW, Inc, CEO of Acceo, CEO of Zenlogics, and President of Park City Solutions.
Prior to his industry career, Ed served as a Navy Medical Service Corps Officer where he gained broad experience in finance, human resources, acquisition management, contracting, IT, and hospital administration. Ed also served as the Program Manager of the Resources Information Technology Program Office, TRICARE Management Activity, where he oversaw a variety of IT programs for the Military Health System (MHS) resources management programs.
Erin founded EMKS as a Woman-owned Small Business in 2015 and now, as EMKS's Executive Vice President, she provides day-to-day leadership of EMKS's business functions, driving the company's vision, tone, and strategic direction as established by our President and CEO. She is responsible for business planning and ensuring that all team members understand exactly how their role impacts the success of those plans. She works closely with the CEO to provide business planning, communication, and an overall common vision that aligns with the "One Team" leadership approach.
Prior to founding EMKS, Erin held several leadership roles in the commercial sector, including her previous role as EMKS Chief Operating Officer (COO). She previously held the position of Deputy Project Manager for Enterprise Testing Service's Risk Based Testing Analysis team, leading a team of over 50 functional and technical analysts who tested products on behalf of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Before that, she served as Task Manager for the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) Evolution Risk Analysis team and was responsible for analyzing and reporting on findings around Business Requirements Documents (BRDs), Requirements Specification Documents (RSDs), Software Design Documents (SDDs), and Requirements Traceability Matrices (RTMs). She performed Criticality and Risk Assessment (CARA) scoring for VA's Office of Information and Technology (OIT) project and product requirements to determine risk level and criticality. As a systems integration engineer/tester, Erin reviewed development team system under test (SUT) artifacts, assessed associated system level risk, and monitored software quality assurance (SQA) test activities. As appropriate, she staged independent validation and verification (IV&V) testing for large scale VistA systems, products, or software that interfaced with VistA, including Health Level 7 (HL7) interface testing using tools such as Iguana. She also served as a Corporate Training Lead twice and is an expert in systems training.
Throughout her career, Erin dedicated herself to supporting business and IT initiatives critical to many vital agencies. Erin's technical specialties include exploratory testing and test case design for systems modeling and systems analysis as well as equivalence class partitioning, boundary analysis, and parametrization for test data creation. She is a Certified ICAgile Professional, ISTQB Foundations Software Tester Certified, IT Service Management (ITILv3) Foundation Certified, and Iguana Level 1 Certified. Erin is also a self-taught MUMPS programmer.
Erin holds a Bachelor's degree in Finance from the University of South Florida, and an Associate of Arts, Business (honors) from St. Petersburg College. Among her industry awards and honors, she was a recent recipient of a 2020 Leading for Impact: Women in Leadership Award which recognizes women who guide, mentor, and drive the federal IT industry through their impactful leadership. A dedicated Project Management Professional (PMP), she is a firm believer that by providing sound leadership and by taking care of staff and clients first, success will follow.
Job Titles:
- Vice President of Health Solutions
As Vice President of Health Solutions, Jen Rosas leads the delivery of solutions designed and developed for the healthcare industry. With over 25 years of experience leading multi-disciplinary and cross-organizational teams, Jen promotes growth while capitalizing on her experience in the public and private sector both a project and program manager. She has managed large-scale, complex system government development projects such as the Department of Defense (DoD) TRICARE Management Activity's outpatient billing, scheduling, and credentialing systems, She also managed over 800 deliverables a month for the U.S. Family Health Plan data support contract, a $1 billion dollar program. Since 2019, Jen has served the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) effort as the Program Manager, the Health Information Exchange (HIE) subject matter expert, and a contract senior leadership team member to provide Independent Validation and Verification (IV&V) services.
Before joining EMKS, Jen worked as a consultant, which included conducting organizational process assessments to improve organizational project management practices, developing standardized CMMI® Maturity Level 3 compliant methodologies, and creating workflows that accommodate both waterfall and Agile methodologies. In the non-profit sector, Jen spent 6 years as the Director for the eHealth Exchange (eHX) for The Sequoia Project, the largest public-private health information network in the country. Under her leadership, the network grew from approximately 33 participants to over 200 participants through the relationships she fostered with federal agencies such as Department of Defense (DoD), VA, Social Security Administration (SSA), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and HIE organizations along with large healthcare systems (e.g., CommonSpirit Health, Dignity Health, Cleveland Clinic) and technology vendors (i.e., Epic and Cerner).
Jen began her professional career working for the Naval Medical Information Management Center in Bethesda, Maryland, as a part-time summer government employee where she continued working as a civil service employee. There she learned the Navy medical personnel system and transitioned to the Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission, where she was quickly indoctrinated into project management and database conversion while working on Oracle database migration requirements development.
Jen holds a Bachelor's in Political Science and German from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, a Masters in Project Management from Keller Graduate School of Management, and a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute. Her diverse background gives her a unique approach to managing both people and processes. By drawing upon all areas of her background and expertise to devise solutions and utilize her multi-dimensional perspective. However, it is her unique ability to approach any situation and create lasting relationships built on genuine trust that enables her to deliver, time and again, beyond expectations.
Job Titles:
- Chief Financial Officer
- Chief Financial Officer of EMKS
As Chief Financial Officer of EMKS, Lesley provides overall strategic and financial leadership to the organization by overseeing the financial planning, accounting, government reporting, treasury, and auditing functions. Lesley's financial and strategic expertise is a vital component for achieving EMKS's operational objectives regarding the company's growth initiatives, business development efforts, and program management while also maintaining regulatory compliance. Lesley has over 25 years of accounting experience, the last 14 years of which were focused specifically on government contract accounting.
As the Chief Technology Officer for EMKS, Michael is responsible for budgeting, acquiring, and managing IT resources and delivering improved business outcomes from our technology management team. With over 40 years of proven engineering and enterprise architecture expertise, he is our CEO's principal IT advisor who helps establish long term strategic goals, define policies and procedures relating to EMKS's IT infrastructure, and maintain strategic partner relationships. Michael has proven expertise in many roles, including executive management, program strategy, enterprise architecture, systems engineering, test engineering, system analysis, program and technical management as well as test and evaluation (T&E) management.
Prior to joining EMKS, Michael focused on supporting Healthcare automation initiatives, with his principal customers being the Defense Health Agency (DHA) and the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). He led technical efforts to plan, design, and implement major commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products related to electronic health records (EHRs) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) along with world-wide IT infrastructure and global Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. Michael served as Chief Systems Engineer for both the Military Health System (MHS) Chief Information Officer and the Joint Medical Information Systems (JMIS) Program Executive Office (PEO). For MHS, Michael led a system engineering policy and process improvement effort as well as reduced complexity and increased cost savings by identifying key cost drivers and messaging infrastructure redundancy. Likewise, as the Strategic Business Advisor to the Office of the DHA Chief Acquisition Executive, Michael led the policy and procedures development to stabilize the DHA multi-billion dollar per year acquisition portfolio by looking for synergy wherever possible. He also improved interoperability, integration, and health information exchange (HIE) between medical devices and DHA Health IT Portfolio Programs. Michael worked to transform T&E into a risk-driven process to better support acquisition reform initiatives. Michael successfully led a large multi-agency ERP effort for the Defense Agencies Initiative (DAI) Program's Business Transformation Agency (BTA)/Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) process implementation.
Michael's engineering career began in 1974 as a Navy Civilian, where he effectively promoted acquisition system changes to provide testable system designs within Department of Defense (DoD). As a trusted visionary, proven leader, mentor, and change agent with a sterling reputation for integrity, Michael brings an energy of innovation and creativity to every challenge.
Michael has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering (Computer Systems) and a Master's of Science in Electrical Engineering (Computer Systems) from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His innate passion for people makes him a superior mentor and leader as well as a world-class problem solver and strategist. Michael has productively led startups and transformed marginal performing business units into highly successful organizations, which is highlighted by his proven track record for providing executive support at all levels.
As the Chief Executive Officer for the corporation, Mike communicates and leads the internal implementation of the company's vision, tone, and strategic direction. Mike has successfully led and delivered on major challenges in IT operations in both the commercial and government sectors. He actively provides day-to-day leadership and oversight of all operations management, strategic planning, subcontractor management, contract administration, project planning & execution, recruiting, and business development. He achieves EMKS's operational objectives by overseeing the strategic plans that drive the company's growth initiatives, managing senior-level customer relationships, and delivering value to clients, partners, and employees alike. Mike's business planning leadership style ensures all team members understand not only the strategy, but how vital their role is to its overall success. This "people first" philosophy shapes the entire organization using cross-functional teams and projects to create an overall company-wide common vision with a "One Team" leadership approach.
Prior to accepting the position of CEO of EMKS, Mike served as Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Planned Systems International, Inc. (PSI), where he expanded services, improved corporate performance and installed a world-class quality management program. Mike is a self-motivated, highly effective leader who brings senior executive experience and over 37 years of progressive experience in health care delivery and information systems leadership that entailed managing large budgets and complex programs. His background includes improving operations, growing businesses, and maximizing financial success through achievements in customer service, organizational effectiveness, and programmatic efficiencies. Mike leverages his extensive professional experience in both the commercial and federal sector to bring value to clients. He is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) dedicated to improving processes and performance, believing that success is ultimately about developing solutions that deliver the required capabilities and exceed user expectations.
While in the Navy Medical Service Corps, Mike had a successful career as a healthcare administrator and has worked as a commercial consultant and a government program manager. He served as the Deputy Program Executive Officer for the Joint Medical Information Systems (JMIS) TRICARE Management Activity, where he provided oversaw and managed all Military Health System (MHS) central IT programs. Mike has dedicated his career to supporting the critical business and IT initiatives that are crucial to many important organizations and clients. Among Mike's military, government, and civilian awards, he recently received the 2021 FedHealthIT 100 award, which recognizes individuals who lead change and advancement in Federal Health IT, and the 2021 G2Xchange Disruptive Tech Change Agent Award.
Job Titles:
- Vice President of National Security Solutions
As Vice President of National Security Solutions, Mr. David N. Leather leads the delivery of solutions and services designed and developed for our National Security clients, which includes the Department of State (DoS), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). Mr. Leather's 20-plus years of military and civilian leadership experience and expertise leading complex programs provide the foundation to his contributions to leadership, strategic planning, and daily operations, which are key to growing EMKS's National Security vertical.
Prior to joining EMKS, Mr. Leather worked as the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD) Accounts Manager for CORTEK Inc. In this role he provided valuable onsite support to the DoS Foreign Consequence Management Program (FCM) under the International Security and Nonproliferation Bureau (ISN), Office of Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism (WMDT).
Mr. Leather is a retired U.S. Navy submarine officer. After commissioning in 1998, he completed his training in nuclear reactor plant operations, submarine operations, and as a Navy Diver before conducting operational tours on both fast attack and ballistic missile submarines. Ashore, he has completed staff assignments as an instructor at the Nuclear Power Training Command, Joint Ops Center XO - U.S. European Command, Fleet Planner at U.S. Pacific Fleet, and Chief Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and Nuclear Planner at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Mr. Leather's final tour on active duty was as the acting Division Chief for DTRA's CBRN Preparedness Program (CP2).
A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, U.S. Naval War College, the Maritime Advance Warfighting School (MAWS), and the Joint Forces Staff College, Mr. Leather currently resides in Fairfax, Virginia, with his wife and two teenage sons.
Job Titles:
- Vice President of Defense Solutions
As Vice President of Defense Solutions, Mr. Marc Walker leads the delivery of solutions and services designed and developed for the Department of Defense (DoD). With over 34 years of DoD experience leading multi-disciplinary teams, Mr. Walker's contributions to leadership, strategic planning, and daily operations are key to growing EMKS's Defense vertical.
Prior to joining EMKS, Mr. Walker served as the Headquarters Department of Army (HQDA), G-3/5/7 Mission Command Project Manager/Senior Analyst for CORTEK, Inc. where he led a multi-disciplinary team focused on Integration and Data Management along with Current and Future Operations. Before his dual-role assignment, he led the Integration Branch of Mission Command for Ventura Group, Inc. where he focused on the synchronization of Mission Command efforts across multiple Army Staff sections and an impressive 28-year career serving in the U.S. Army where he worked in the Strategic Planning, Operations, and Training communities at numerous locations and commands, including the Pentagon.
Mr. Walker began his career as an enlisted Infantryman in the Nebraska Army National Guard before commissioning as a Regular Army Second Lieutenant (2LT) in the Air Defense Artillery (Patriot). He later transitioned to the Logistics Corps for his final 20 years and proudly served in the European and Southwest Asia theaters. He has led or commanded from squad level up to a multi-functional Brigade Support Battalion and led a team that advised and trained a newly formed Iraqi Logistics Battalion while simultaneously conducting operations in a combat zone. He also developed scenarios and led Mission Command Training Program Observers/Trainers who assisted Army brigade level logistics units as they prepared to deploy. Mr. Walker played a key role at the Pentagon as an Organizational Integrator, leading the successful development, synchronization, and implementation of three major Army Chief of Staff initiatives that modernized the Logistic Unit Headquarters.
Mr. Walker holds a Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice from the University of Nebraska-Kearney and has completed numerous Army Logistics and Leadership courses, including the Army Command and General Staff College.