For more than 20 years, one of Brain Technologies’ most influential and successful associates has been a personable, resourceful, highly educated self-starter who calls the Philippines home. That is, when she is home.

Which was the primary point of her latest honor—the prestigious Bagong Bayani Award, bestowed annually by a government ministry (labor) and an educational foundation on a few Filipino citizens who have done an outstanding job of representing a workforce more than one million strong that leaves the Philippines every year to find job opportunities and generate income for themselves, their families and the Filipino economy.

Dr. Perla was one of 16 individuals and two groups who received the 2014 Bagong Bayani (which means “new hero”) award. They included a housekeeper who won the first season of “The X Factor Israel” TV-show-based singing competition and the 291 Filipino crew members of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, who performed heroically when the ship sank off Italy in early 2012.

You can see her receiving the beautiful statuette and accompanying medallion in photos taken at the September 22 award ceremonies in Manila below.

They were given to her in ceremonies at the Philippines International Convention Center. Since representatives of her employer abroad were asked to attend, two senior administrators of Assumption University’s graduate school of business in Bangkok were present. They were Dean Dr. Kitti Photikitti and Associate Dean Dr. Kitikorn Dowpiset. She was also accompanied by her husband, Dr. Oscar Tayko, a retired professor of agriculture and also a tireless cooperative development advocate/practitioner in the Philippines.

The citation accompanying the award makes mention of BTC’s four-brain (BrainMap®) model, which has been a bedrock of much of Perla’s professional and academic work. It is also a mainstay (along with three other BTC brain-function-tracking models and their accompanying assessments) in the AU business school’s organizational development programs.

Among her many achievements, the citation notes this: “In 1994, she designed a masteral program in Organizational Development (OD) for Assumption University and nurtured it through the years that led to the graduation of more than 400 holders of masteral degrees and 46 doctoral degrees.”

The recognition has kept coming. The Bangkok university’s top officials honored Perla recently with a dinner at the Four Wings Hotel attended by the institution’s present president and its president emeritus, among other dignitaries. Three other Bangkok-based BTC associates were there, all of them affiliated with AU: Dr. Dowpiset, Dr. Sirichai Preudhikulpradab and Dr. Maria Socorro Cristina L. Fernando.

Absent Dr. Tayko’s tireless, persuasive efforts, the story of Brain Technologies in Southeast Asia would be a very different tale. We’ve made our appreciation known to Perla, and it is greatly gratifying to us that she has received such notable attention in her own country.

Oh, you might be interested in where Perla has been lately. She was in Chiang Mai, Thailand, for a few days, teaching an OD class, then back to Bangkok to do a program at AU’s Organization Development Institute, which she helped found, and to see the business school’s current crop of graduates on their way. She plans to be home in the suburbs of Manila soon. But she won’t be there long; winners of the Bagong Bayani Award never are. We are so proud to know her and count us as “one of us.”