Michael Luttrell, this year’s Outstanding Staff Award winner, worked hard to keep the campus safe during a chaotic year of pandemic fears and a devastating wildfire.
Luttrell is the 26th winner of the Outstanding Staff award, which was originally established by the UC Santa Cruz Alumni Association in 1995, to honor a staff member who has gone “above and beyond” to provide distinguished service to students, staff and colleagues.
The UC Santa Cruz Alumni Association partners with the Staff Advisory Board to solicit nominations, choose, and honor both the nominees and the annual awardee.
Luttrell maintained his focus, good humor, and resiliency even while having to move to temporary housing when last August's CZU Lightning Complex fires threatened his home in Boulder Creek.
As the campus’s operations and logistics manager for COVID-19 testing on campus, Luttrell oversaw a hard-working team that administered to date close to 100,000 COVID tests for students, faculty, and staff. That operations team included 66 students.
“It has been amazing to see how resilient our student body is,” Luttrell said. “When we first started [the TestMe COVID-19 testing] initiative, I wondered if students would want to put themselves out there in the middle of a pandemic and do this kind of work. But we got a couple of hundred applications just within the first couple of days. We ended up hiring between 65 and 70 students in the past year.”
Until very recently, the words "oversee COVID-19 testing" were nowhere to be found in Luttrell’s job description.
Luttrell made a name for himself as head of operations of UC Santa Cruz Conference Services, managing programs that drew more than 10,000 visitors to campus every summer for camps, conferences, and retreats.
But the advent of COVID brought a temporary end to all those in-person conferences starting in the summer of 2020.
Associate Vice Chancellor of Risk and Safety Services Jean Marie Scott reached out to College, Housing, and Educational Services—a department that includes Conference Services—to ask if staff members could help with the COVID testing effort.
As if that abrupt job change weren’t enough of a challenge all by itself, Luttrell also had to contend with the devastating CZU Lightning Complex fires, which spread across 86,000 acres in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties. Threat of the fires forced Luttrell, his wife, and their then 1-year-old daughter to evacuate from their Boulder Creek home for 39 days.
Luttrell was overwhelmed by the outpouring of help and concern he received from UCSC colleagues.
“When I was displaced for almost 40 days, people were always calling and texting," Luttrell said. "In some cases, I didn’t know they knew where I lived!”
“I don’t know how he does it”
The campus’s Staff Advisory Board (SAB) in partnership with the UC Santa Cruz Alumni Association chooses honorees based on letters of recommendation on behalf of candidates—and the statements for Luttrell were unstinting in their praise for his energy, his handling of complicated logistics, and his total dedication to the campus’s well-being.
“I do not know how he does it all,” one coworker wrote in a letter of recommendation. “He went from being a conference services manager to overseeing a HUGE project: getting the COVID Kiosk testing program up and running for our entire campus.
“As a site supervisor working on this project alongside him, I have appreciated his leadership, ability to remain calm, and his long-game vision,” the letter continued. “Being redeployed was a big deal for all of us. Working around lab supplies and dealing with COVID-related work was new for all of us, and it was really stressful at the beginning. Michael played a huge role in helping all of us adjust.”
The coworker also mentioned Luttrell's kindness and humor, and his trademark humility. That last quality came across strongly when Luttrell confessed that he was “shocked” to receive the award, and that he had, in fact, been pushing for someone else to receive the same honors.
Initially, when a member of the SAB called him to inform him that he received the award, Luttrell thought he was merely “a finalist,” until the caller clarified that he was “the finalist.”
“It was definitely humbling because I never did this work on campus in order to be recognized,” Luttrell said. “I just want to help this community as much as possible. I want to be part of it. I want to do what I can. It’s incredible when you think of all the fully committed people on this campus—the students jumping in to help, the community rallying during the fires.”
Considering the aftermath of COVID
Even now with a slowing down of testing on campus, Luttrell still juggles many roles: Managing supplies and complicated supply chains; communicating with labs, higher-ups at UCSC, and student health leadership; and still supervising 60-plus students who help run the three kiosk testing sites.
Worries about especially contagious variants, and people refusing vaccines, have raised doubts about how soon the United States can resume normal activities without fears of further dangers, shutdowns, and restrictions.
But Luttrell has every intention of transitioning back to his pre-COVID conference responsibilities if the opportunity arises.
Outstanding Staff honorable mention awards
The UC Santa Cruz Alumni Association and Staff Advisory Board recognized four additional Honorable Mention winners this year, all of them working on the front lines of COVID.
“They went far above and beyond to support our campus and community during a time of crisis,” the SAB said.
Those staff members include:
- Rocio De La Cruz, custodial supervisor, who managed constantly changing rules and procedures regarding COVID-19 safety, and also expanded cleaning services. Through her efforts, her team was available wherever and whenever they were needed;
- Frank Dang, student health services IT lead, who was instrumental in developing the IT systems for the health center in order to continue to provide healthcare to UCSC's students during the pandemic;
- Christina Lombardo, health and safety programs manager, who coordinated the operations of the Environmental Health and Safety department’s COVID-19 response, conducted most of the site evaluations to determine which buildings were ready for reoccupation, and led the team that developed the campus's COVID-19 Workplace Safety training module; and
- Michael Tassio, chief of staff for the Division of Academic Affairs and director of online education, who has been central to the planning of remote and online learning and played a big role in helping faculty make the transition to remote teaching.
