Introducing the 2026 Vittorio Bertocci Award Winners
2026 marks the third year of the Vittorio Bertocci Award, which celebrates and amplifies those individuals who are advancing the development of identity standards. Every year, the pool of applicants gets bigger; the scale of their combined contributions grows.
This year we are delighted to thank Okta for their generous contribution, given in honor of Vittorio, a beloved member of their team. It enables DIAF to expand our impact, including the addition of a third VBA winner.
Vittorio couldn’t fathom a world where people built identity products without understanding the identities they were protecting. He helped build the machinery behind the login box because he saw so acutely the people who were in front of it.
-from Okta’s “In Celebration of Vittorio Bertocci“
Part of Vittorio’s legacy is the cultivation of interest in identity and standards – and the uplifting of people everywhere to do the work. For this year’s Vittorio Bertocci award, DIAF welcomed a global pool of applicants from an incredible, inspiring group of people. We are grateful to all of them for living Vittorio’s values through their work every day.
Join us in celebrating this year’s winners: Christian Eloysio, Ayesha Dissanayaka, and Sean O’Dell.
Christian Eloysio
Christian Eloysio is a Product Lead at Raidiam, where he works at the heart of some of the world’s largest regulated data-sharing ecosystems. He leads the delivery of Raidiam Assure, the certification infrastructure that hundreds of financial institutions must pass to participate in Open Finance Brasil and Open Insurance Brasil – one of the world’s largest open data ecosystems – and is currently the Solution Architect for Great Britain’s Consumer Consent Service for the retail energy sector, where he is helping define a FAPI 2.0-based security profile that takes identity standards born in finance into an entirely new industry. His work spans OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, FAPI, Grant Management, Shared Signals Framework, and Rich Authorization Requests.
A former Brazilian Air Force aviator and flight instructor turned identity practitioner, Christian is passionate about the moment where specifications meet reality: profiles, conformance, and the engineering that makes consent infrastructure trustworthy at national scale. He lives in Florianópolis, Brazil, where he is also a triathlete and a choro guitarist.
Ayesha Dissanayaka
Ayesha is an Associate Director and Lead Architect for Agentic AI Identity and Access Management (IAM) at WSO2. With over 12 years of enterprise IAM experience, she has contributed significantly to flagship Open-source IAM products including WSO2 Identity Server, ThunderID, and the SaaS IAM solution built on the same foundation.
She designs production-grade authentication, delegation, and authorization frameworks that allow organizations to safely grant autonomous AI systems access to real-world infrastructure at scale. A strong advocate for open standards, Ayesha co-authored the OpenID Foundation’s white paper “Identity Management for Agentic AI” and serves as an inaugural Agentic AI Foundation Ambassador. Beyond her core architectural work, she is a frequent speaker and writer on AI security. Based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Ayesha balances her global career with motherhood, backed by a deeply supportive family.
Sean O’Dell
Sean “O’Dentity” O’Dell is a Distinguished Engineer at CVS Health, setting vision and execution for Identity and Security. With 15+ years shaping enterprise IAM, he’s a trusted advisor to practitioners and executives alike, and a driving force behind modern event-driven IAM architectures, Continuous Identity, and Agentic Trust.
His current focus is securing the next identity frontier: agentic AI. He is designing and implementing the authorization models, identity frameworks, and access control patterns that let autonomous agents authenticate, act, and be trusted for enterprise ecosystems.
A recognized thought leader, he co-chairs the Shared Signals Working Group in the OpenID Foundation, participates in the AI in IAM Community Group, and is active in IDPro. He writes on identity security at Identity Underground, where his work on Agentic Trust, including the use of SPIFFE as a foundation for Agentic ID and authentication, has been adopted by teams at major AI and Cloud providers. On Identity Underground, he’s also leading the next initiative, “Identity in Depth.” He’s a frequent speaker and author on identity standards, event-driven security, the realities of securing both IAM and Agentic systems at scale. Through conferences, keynotes, podcasts, and publications, he shares insights on Continuous Identity, Zero Trust, and Agentic Trust…ensuring that when identity evolves, he’s at the forefront driving innovation.
