Our Team for Success

Mr. Abebe has over 25 years of experience in the IT and applications program and design industries. As a pioneer in the IT and government contracting industries, he leverages his expertise to serve the essential business requirements of several Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies. Under Mr. Abebe’s leadership, Eagle Technologies has achieved high scores with the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), the Office of Head Start (OHS), and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

Before founding Eagle Technologies, Mr. Abebe was a senior consultant for Intelsat, a major satellite company. In this role, he was responsible for programming many mission-critical launches. Several of his former team members at Intelsat joined Mr. Abebe at Eagle Technologies. Together they built the Head Start Enterprise System (HSES), a significant Enterprise Management Solution developed for OHS grant recipients and federal program offices across the country. Eagle’s SAMHSA project was another significant accomplishment with an unprecedented $120M budget. Both projects have earned outstanding ratings under the management of Eagle Technologies contractors. Mr. Abebe continues to lead and evolve Eagle Technologies in its mission to develop IT solutions that benefit the nation’s important end users into the next century.

Mr. Abebe received a Bachelor of Science in Computer and Information Science from the University of Maryland University College in College Park, MD. An advocate of the power of education, Mr. Abebe ensures Eagle Technologies employees are funded in educational pursuits that support the evolving IT industry. As a result, Eagle holds applauded corporate ISO and CMMI certifications, and over 90% of staff hold Agile, AWS, and other certifications related to their functional roles.

Mr. Garcia is a strategic business development leader with more than 30 years of diverse experience across multiple markets. He has directed business development, sales, and strategic management initiatives for DoD, DHS, HHS, USASAC, Foreign Military Sales (FMS) and Commercial industry entities.  As Director of Business Development for Eagle Technologies, Inc., Mr. Garcia leverages decades of management expertise to drive business development resulting in corporate growth. His expansive industry knowledge and comfort maneuvering through Govt. requirements, political obstacles, and program management/oversight has resulted in the ability to move projects from concept to completion on domestic and global fronts with remarkable success. Mr. Garcia is a retired 23-year veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard whose career milestones include FMS Program Manager, Government Contracting Officer, and Maritime Law Enforcement and Tactical Training Officer. He holds a Masters in Legal Studies (MLS – Contract Law), Masters of Science in Management (MSM – Project Management), Masters in Public Administration (MPA – Govt. Management), and a Bachelor’s in Business Management (BBA).

Mr. Dacu is a strategic technology leader with more than 30 years of experience in the federal, state, and local government marketplace. This experience includes a wide spectrum of IT modalities including enterprise, data, and solution architecture; cloud and platform services; software modernization; operations and maintenance; business process reengineering and automation; software development lifecycle analysis; and program management.

In his role as Chief Technology Officer at Eagle Technologies, Inc., Mr. Dacu uses sound and modern principles and practices to connect technical, human, and managerial aspects to drive the company’s technological enrichment on a growth-focused strategic path. In addition, he ensures continued organizational growth by providing leadership and practical skills to business development efforts, as well as capture and proposal management.

Previously, Mr. Dacu held a number of technical leadership roles for DMI in Bethesda, MD, including Vice President/Health IT Lead Architect, Senior Director, and Senior Architect. During that time, he was instrumental in helping develop successful cloud practices and business development strategies from concept to completion—resulting in DMI surpassing its financial goals for margin and profit year after year.

Mr. Dacu received a Master of Science degree from Polytechnic Institute School of Electronics and Telecommunications in Bucharest, Romania.

​Ms. Margaret Smith is an experienced leader with a strong background in accounting and finance, as well as Information Technology and e-commerce. She has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Temple University and a master’s degree in business administration with a post-graduate certificate in e-commerce from Johns Hopkins University. In her current role at Eagle Technologies, Ms. Smith serves as the Chief Operating Officer. She aligns teams around shared vision and goals and ensures high-quality communications that comply with government initiatives. Ms. Smith also serves as the IT Program Director for the Head Start Enterprise System, leading a multi-year project to consolidate data and applications for the Head Start Program. In this role, Ms. Smith is responsible for overseeing the IT operations of the Head Start Enterprise System (HSES) for the Office of Head Start (OHS) and leading a team of 50 professional business and technical staff. She also worked closely with top-level OHS federal officials and Head Start contractors to provide or receive data via API channels. Ms. Smith collaborated to develop a world-class help desk that provides technical and business solutions and training on new features, including the annual program survey (PIR).

As the Director of Eagle’s Cloud Business and Chief Enterprise Architect, Mr. Viswanath brings together extensive management experience and technology expertise to deliver mission critical solutions to federal government and private sector customers. He has over 20 years of experience serving in management and leadership roles across engineering, manufacturing, telecom, financial, entertainment, healthcare, civilian and defense sectors. Mr. Viswanath graduated with M.S. in Engineering from Iowa State University and holds certifications in PMP and ITIL. Over the last 25 years, he successfully led business process reengineering, automation, enterprise data integration, application modernization, and cloud migration projects at various clients including at Caterpillar, Morgan Stanley, Vodafone, Kodak, Library of Congress, CMS, IRS, and DoD. Mr. Viswanath currently manages a team of domain experts, technology leaders, and strategic partners to develop an enterprise grants management system that automates Federal Integrated Business Framework (FIBF) for Grants Management Business Lifecycle.

Dr. Linda Hermer is Eagle’s Senior Project Director and Director of Research. Dr. Hermer first came to Eagle in 2020 to lead Eagle’s Research Team in conducting behavioral health research projects as part of Eagle’s BHSIS contract with SAMHSA. Since then, it has become her mission to make Eagle’s Research and Evaluation efforts self-sustaining and profitable. Toward that end, she led the development of Eagle’s technical proposal for Domain 1 (Feasibility, Pilot and Evaluation Studies) of the SAMHSA IDIQ, which helped win Eagle an IDIQ award in 2022. She and her team have also been striving to expand Eagle’s R&E expertise to other areas, to broaden the range of contracts and grants for which the company can compete.

Dr. Hermer earned her undergraduate degree in Neurobiology and Linguistics at Harvard College, and she obtained her doctorate from Cornell University in Psychology and Cognitive Studies. After learning the then-groundbreaking technique of multisite, multielectrode recording—allowing the simultaneous recording of thousands of neurons from brains of awake, behaving rats and mice–she established and directed her own laboratory as an assistant professor at the University of Florida. Some of Dr. Hermer’s research articles have been cited thousands of times.

About ten years ago, Dr. Hermer decided to devote the second half of her career to improving public health more directly. She gained epidemiological, health policy, and statistical expertise as a Chair Scholar at the George Washington University and has since leveraged her technical expertise to modernize or expand public health research at several organizations. She has also led several major program evaluations. For example, while serving as senior scientist and managing director of research at LeadingAge, she led a highly successful evaluation of a statewide program to incentivize the adoption of person-centered care in nursing homes in Kansas encompassing 349 facilities.

Mr. Whitesell has led operational support and release management teams for the Office of Head Start Enterprise System, which serves more than 900,000 children across the US through over 50,000 classrooms in more than 18,000 centers, with a staff of over 200,000 and more than 1,000,000 volunteers. Mr. Whitesell has provided leadership, mentoring, and best practices for implementing and managing security roles, permissions, users, and their relationships using Rule-based Access Control (RBAC). He has also established standard operating procedures and approaches for business analysis, process modeling, communications, account management, issue triage, and closure handling. Additionally, Mr. Whitesell has successfully led the management of data quality and relationships for over 13,000 active and inactive grants and 5,550 replacements. In this capacity he has provided risk and impact assessments, configuration and rollout strategies, and overseen the management of artifacts, requirements, data, reports, and communications for the Office of Head Start, including the annual Program Information Report (PIR) survey. Prior to this role, Mr. Whitesell worked as a post-employee consultant for Pfizer, serving as an information architect for transformational projects, and was the business process and information-architecture lead for a successful global asset management system consolidation and alignment initiative. He also served as the business and design lead for the development a contract management system for tracking clinical trial contracts and outsourcing.

Li-Yong Yu is Eagle’s Director of Information Systems. He joined Eagle in 2007 and is an innovative, accomplished global senior information technology professional with 30+ years of technology experience and track records of success in directing complex multimillion-dollar initiatives, joint ventures, strategic alliances, and marketing partnerships to successful outcomes. His exceptional performance in leading multi-national and multi-cultural cross-functional teams in designing, developing, and operating large-scale global ICT infrastructure, data center, and application system solutions meet tight timelines and budget requirements. He is an effective analyst, facilitator, problem-solver, and communicator, particularly adept in aligning innovative technologies with the top-priority business need of public, international, and private sectors. He served as the chief infrastructure architect to establish ICT infrastructure and application platforms (On-premises and Cloud) for Eagle’s BHSIS and HSES projects. He also supported the BHSIS project to collect and compile a range of behavioral health services information for CBHSQ/SAMHSA. Before joining Eagle, Mr. Yu served in various technical and managerial roles, including Director of Information System Management, Director of Program Management, Chief Architect, and Department Head in Intelsat, CSC, and SAIC.

Mr. Yu holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from Tamkang University in Taipei, Taiwan, and a Ph. D. Candidate in Computer Science at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.