The award in question was given to developer Matthew Garrett, for work done while he was an employee of Red Hat, to enable Linux to boot on computer systems that have secure boot enabled. Garrett no longer works for Red Hat.
Secure boot is a feature in the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, the replacement for the motherboard firmware or BIOS. It has been implemented by Microsoft for Windows 8 in a manner that effectively prevents easy booting of other operating systems on machines which have secure boot enabled.