February 6, 2026
The Board of Regents is pleased to present a KUDOS award to Dana Abu Swailem, Business Systems Analyst at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln.
Dana joined the Financial Systems Team at UNL in July 2018. She quickly established herself as a valuable team member utilizing her technical expertise and proactive approach to problem solving. She anticipates needs, identifies opportunities for improvement, and delivers efficient solutions. Her work embodies the operational excellence that enables the academic mission to flourish. An example of her work is how she helped transform a time intensive, manual process affecting academic departments across campus. She delivered a solution that has improved how we serve graduate students.
Partnering with the payroll team and Graduate Studies, Dana designed an automated database to streamline the Graduate Fellowship process. Previously, academic departments submitted fellowships one at a time, this was time consuming, diverting attention from student-facing priorities. Dana’s solution allows departments to submit comprehensive fellowship lists that are automatically validated against Data Warehouse information, errors are flagged for correction before processing. The verified data flows seamlessly into a payroll upload template for SAP, eliminating hundreds of individual manual entries.
The impact this project has extends across the entire campus. Academic departments now spend less time on fellowship processes and more time supporting graduate students.
Joining Dana today are her spouse, Tareq Daher, Assistant Professor of Practice in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, and Lacey Rohe, Associate Vice Chancellor and Controller.
Please join me in thanking Dana for her dedication to the University of Nebraska—Lincoln.