Waspy Awards

Awarded for the Project Person of the Year Jannik joined the OWASP around 2017 after being introduced to the Juice Shop project at university. He then became a regular contributor to the Juice Shop project and created the MultiJuicer project to enable people to run trainings and workshops with Juice Shop. He is now a project lead for both the OWASP Juice Shop and OWASP secureCodeBox projects.

Awarded for Event Person of the Year Jim Manico has been deeply involved in the OWASP community for more than two decades, beginning his volunteer journey in 2003. Over the years he has taken on a wide range of leadership and hands-on roles. - Global Governance. Elected to OWASP’s Global Board of Directors (2011 – 2014), where he helped shape the foundation’s strategic direction, fundraising model, and community-driven governance. - OWASP Cheat Sheet Series (2009 – present) - Co-founder and long-time project manager, coordinating dozens of security cheat sheets that distill complex topics into actionable, developer-friendly guidance. - OWASP Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS) & Artificial Intelligence Security Verification Standard (AISVS) - Core contributor and project manager, ensuring that both standards remain technically rigorous, developer-centric, and mapped to modern threat landscapes. - Regular contributor to other flagship initiatives, including the OWASP Top Ten and Proactive Controls. - Community Building & Education. A frequent keynote speaker and trainer at AppSec USA, AppSec EU, and dozens of local OWASP chapters, Jim has delivered hundreds of secure-coding workshops worldwide, championing open knowledge and evidence-based practices. - Recognition. Honored with OWASP’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2023) for sustained, high-impact service—a testament to his belief in the foundation’s mission of “making software security visible, so that individuals and organizations can make informed decisions. A true believer in OWASP’s open, vendor-neutral ethos, Jim remains an active contributor, mentor, and evangelist—continuing to advance the state of software security through community-driven standards, education, and tooling.

Awarded for Chapter Person of the Year John is a Lifetime Member of OWASP, having first joined in 2014, while living and working in Kansas City, Missouri. He has been active in the New Zealand Chapter since moving to Auckland in late 2017. John took on a leadership role in the New Zealand Chapter in April 2018, restarting the Auckland Meetup, which he led until May 2024, when he moved to Hamilton. Once settled there, John launched the Hamilton Meetup, which is now going strong. John became Chair of the annual OWASP New Zealand Day conference in 2019, keeping it going through COVID lockdowns, border closures, and travel bans. This year, he is coaching his successor, so he can ‘retire’ as conference chair after his seventh. John helped organize the student-focused security.ac.nz event, in 2019 and 2022. He also organizes OWASP Training Day events around New Zealand. Beyond the chapter, John has been a member of the OWASP SAMM Project’s core team since 2018, has been part of the Chapters and Education and Training Committees, and has founded a number of small OWASP projects.

Awarded for Project Person of the Year Felipe Zipitria is an expert in computer security, graduated with an MSc from the Universidad de la República in Uruguay. With over 20 years of experience in SRE, DevOps, and SysAdmin roles, Felipe has transitioned into specialized areas, dedicating the past 5 years to AppSec and Cloud SecOps. His extensive expertise spans security consulting for over a decade. Passionate about education, Felipe instructs pregraduate students in Computer Security Fundamentals and guides postgraduates in Web Application Security at the local public University, with the help of OWASP published materials. He started as the Uruguay Co-Chapter Leader in 2013, and started engaging in projects with global outreach. He is a longstanding contributor to OWASP CRS, serving as a developer and co-leader since 2021 and he is part of the OWASP Coraza leadership team, focusing on the development of new Web Application Firewalls (WAFs). Committed to fostering open-source engagement, he has served as a Google Summer of Code mentor for four consecutive years, nurturing students involvement in open-source and OWASP initiatives.

Awarded for Chapter Person of the Year 2006: Attending my first OWASP AppSec conference, the OWASP AppSec in Belgium (and only missed two since) 2007: Joining the OWASP Netherlands Chapter Board 2008: First time presenting at an OWASP conference, the OWASP Australia Security Conference at Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia 2008: Chairing the OWASP Education committee, as result of attending the first OWASP Summit in Portugal 2009: Co-organizing the first OWASP BeNeLux-Day, and all of them since 2010: First active involvement in an OWASP AppSec conference, hosting the CTF in Sweden 2011: Co-organizing the OWASP Summit 2011 2015: Conference Chair of the OWASP Global AppSec EU in Amsterdam 2017: Joining the OWASP Global Foundation Board of DIrectors, until 2022 2019: Joining the OWASP Europe Board Over the years, I have been promoting, mentoring and supporting OWASP in general; the various projects, chapters and events. The leaders, organizers, members and volunteers. Anyone trying to find their way into AppSec.

Awarded for Event Person of the Year Shruti Kulkarni is a cyber security / enterprise security architect with experience in ISO27001, PCI-DSS, policies, standards, security tools, threat modeling, risk assessments. Shruti works on security strategies and collaborates with cross-functional groups to implement information security controls in software development life-cycle, service operations, service delivery such that security controls support business requirements. An ardent fan, Shruti joined OWASP in 2013 and is currently project leader for Developer Guide and is the Secretary of the Education Committee.

Awarded for Project Person of the Year Brian has more than 22 years of experience in various roles in IT with the majority of that in application development and security. His day job is serving as Department Chair and Assistant Professor teaching a full load of Computer Science and Cybersecurity classes at Union University. He helped build the FedEx AppSec team, worked on the Trustworthy Computing team at Microsoft, consulted on software security, and served as a project lead and active contributor for SAMM v1.1-2.0+ and OWASP Top 10 2017, 2021, and 2024. Brian is a contributor to the RABET-V Program for assessing non-voting election technology. He holds several Cybersecurity and IT certifications and is working on his Doctor of Computer Science in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance.

Awarded for Event Person of the Year Meghan Jacquot is a Security Engineer with Inspectiv and focuses on vulnerabilities and attack surface management. She is particularly interested in application security, threat intelligence, investigating vulnerabilities, and the ethical use of data. Meghan shares her research via conferences and publications. Throughout the year, she helps a variety of organizations and folks including DEF CON as a SOC GOON, Diana Initiative, OWASP, SANS, and WiCyS. To relax she also spends time visiting national parks, gardening, and hanging with her chinchilla. She’s happy to connect with others on LinkedIn and Mastodon and her handle is CarpeDiemT3ch.

Awarded for Chapter Person of the Year Sam Stepanyan is an Independent Application Security Consultant and Security Architect with over 20 years of experience in the IT industry with a background in software engineering and web application development. Sam has worked for various financial services institutions in the City of London specialising in Application Security consulting, Secure SoftwareDevelopment Lifecycle (SDLC), developer training, source code reviews and vulnerability management. He is also a Subject MatterExpert in Web Application Firewalls (WAF) and SIEM systems. Sam holds a Master’s degree in Software Engineering and a CISSP certification. Sam has been serving as an OWASP London Chapter Leader since November 2015 (with Sherif Mansour) and as OWASP Chapter Committee Chair since August 2020. Sam is also a Project Leader of OWASP Nettacker and a co-leader of OWASP WAFEC project. Sam is a frequent speaker at several BSides conferences as well as OWASP Global AppSec conferences.