[Athen] White House Highlights STEM Innovators in the Disability
Community as "Champions of Change"
Greg Kraus
greg_kraus at ncsu.edu
Fri May 4 12:27:58 PDT 2012
I have to give a special shout out to one of my local colleagues on
the list - Sina Bahram.
Greg
--
Greg Kraus
University IT Accessibility Coordinator
NC State University
919.513.4087
greg_kraus at ncsu.edu
On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 2:55 PM, Laurie Vasquez <Vasquez at sbcc.edu> wrote:
> FYI
>
>
> The Champions of Change program was created as a part of President
> Obama*s Winning the Future initiative. Each week, a different sector
> is highlighted and groups of Champions, ranging from educators to
> entrepreneurs to community leaders, are recognized for the work they are
> doing to serve and strengthen their communities.
>
> To watch this event live, visit http://www.whitehouse.gov/live at 1:30
> pm ET on May 7th.
>
> The White House "Champions of Change" are:
>
> Ralph Braun is the founder and CEO of The Braun Corporation. Diagnosed
> with Spinal Muscular Atrophy in 1947, he began using a wheelchair for
> mobility. Determined to maintain his independence, he engineered the
> worlds first motorized scooter and followed with the first accessible
> vehicle a few years later. The company grew substantially over the next
> decades, and today, The Braun Corporation is the worldwide leader of
> wheelchair accessible vehicles and wheelchair lifts in the mobility
> industry. What started as a part-time business operated from his
> parents* garage has grown into an international corporation with over
> 800 employees. Ralph is now 71 years old and is the father of five adult
> children. He still lives and runs The Braun Corporation from his
> hometown of Winamac, Indiana with his wife, Melody.
>
> Joseph Sullivan is president of Duxbury Systems, Inc., a small company
> that has specialized in software for braille since its founding in 1975,
> and which now employs two blind people and which provides braille
> translation software for more than 130 languages worldwide. He has also
> served on many braille-related committees, including the Literary
> Braille and Computer Braille Committees of the Braille Authority of
> North America, was chair of the technical design subcommittee of the
> Unified English Braille (UEB) project of the International Council on
> English Braille (ICEB), and currently serves on the UEB Maintenance
> Committee of ICEB. Joe believes that braille is the key to literacy for
> blind persons, that literacy is the key to an informed citizenry, and
> that an informed citizenry is essential to civilization.
>
> University of North Texas (UNT) Biochemistry graduate student Nasrin
> Taei is developing a model peptide system to investigate the effects of
> mutations that cause sudden cardiac arrest in young adults. Her model
> system will be used for testing potential candidate drugs that
> ameliorate the structural effects of heart disease causing mutations.
> Nasrin is a member of Phi Theta Kappa an international honor society. As
> a STEM model, she tutored at the community college and mentored high
> school students, which led to her recognition at UNT as a Soaring Eagle.
> Nasrin is being honored as a Champion of Change for her humanitarianism
> and contributions toward discovering a treatment for heart disease and
> making a better future for people around the globe.
>
> Maria Dolores Cimini, Ph.D. is the Assistant Director for Prevention
> and Program Evaluation at the University at Albany Counseling Center and
> has served as the Principal Investigator for over six million dollars in
> behavioral health projects funded by the National Institutes of Health,
> the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and the
> U.S. Department of Education during the past decade. As a
> scientist-practitioner, Dr. Cimini has been active in promoting access
> to STEM for students with disabilities, particularly young women with
> disabilities, through her work with the American Psychological
> Association*s Women with Disabilities in STEM Education Project for
> which she serves as Co-Chair and her mentoring of students and early
> career scientists on a national scale. Through her own experience as a
> scientist with a disability, she is helping our nation identify and
> enhance facilitators and address barriers to STEM education and career
> success for people with disabilities. Dr. Cimini is being honored as a
> Champion of Change for her work in enhancing access to the STEM
> disciplines by students with disabilities through her research,
> leadership, and mentoring efforts.
>
> As a professional and a parent, Virginia Stern has been working for
> more than four decades to raise expectations of persons with
> disabilities, their families, educators, and employers, especially
> employers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
> Since 1977 she was a guiding force of the Project on Science, Technology
> and Disability of the American Association for the Advancement of
> Science (AAAS). She recognized that talented students with disabilities
> needed more than legislation and STEM degrees to gain employment in
> their chosen fields. In 1996 Mrs. Stern and her colleagues developed the
> flagship program, Entry Point!, to provide paid internships and develop
> career skills in the private and public sectors for students with
> disabilities in STEM. Hundreds of Entry Point! alumni have joined and
> continue to advance in the STEM workforce of the nation.
>
> Steve Jacobs is President of IDEAL Group. Steve is dedicated to
> enhancing the accessibility of STEM curriculum for students with
> disabilities. Steve*s company offers software that translates printed
> STEM materials into digital formats for conversion into speech and
> Braille. Steve*s company also developed fully-accessible STEM-enabled
> eBook reading software. Over the past 3-1/2 years, Steve*s company has
> become one of the world*s largest developer of mobile accessibility
> applications with five million installations in 136 countries. Steve is
> also working with many institutions to tech-transfer their STEM-related
> work to mobile platforms. These institutions include
> Smith-Kettlewell*s Video Description R&D Center, University of
> Oregon*s Mathematics eText Research Center, and Georgia Tech wireless
> RERC and sonification lab. Steve is a 1973 graduate of Ohio State
> University. Steve and wife Pauline have been married for 37 years.
> Pauline and Steve have two daughters, Shana and Jessica, and a
> granddaughter Brooke Christine* who is Steve*s boss.
>
> Rafael San Miguel began his career at NASA working on the Space Shuttle
> program, and has spent the past 23 years as a scientist for The
> Coca-Cola Company. He also serves as a board member of the Atlanta
> Speech School, an 80-year old private institution focused on meeting the
> needs of those with speech and language based disabilities. Rafael, who
> has been profoundly deaf since infancy, creates awareness about
> disability by focusing on ability as he inspires young people to pursue
> education in science and math. Using his unique format that presents
> science in an exciting way, he has volunteered at schools both locally
> and in communities where he travels by connecting with underserved
> schools through the volunteer network of Points of Light. Rafael is now
> turning his energies toward a call to action and creating an initiative
> called the U.S. Science Project focused on inspiring individual
> scientists, businesses, legislators and community leaders to scale
> efforts for engaging in impact-driven volunteerism to begin to fill the
> science deficit in our nation through a volunteer Science Corps.
>
> David H. Rose, EdD, is a developmental neuropsychologist and educator
> whose primary focus is on the development of new technologies for
> learning. In 1984, Dr. Rose co-founded CAST, a not-for-profit research
> and development organization whose mission is to improve education, for
> all learners, through universal design for learning (UDL). Dr. Rose also
> teaches at Harvard*s Graduate School of Education where he has been on
> the faculty for more than 25 years. He is the author or editor of
> numerous books and articles on UDL, and the winner of awards from the
> Smithsonian Museum, the Tech Museum, and others.
>
> Christine Reich is Director of Research and Evaluation at the Museum of
> Science, Boston, one of the world's largest science centers. The Museum
> of Science brings science, technology, engineering, and math to about
> 1.5 million visitors a year through its dynamic programs and interactive
> exhibits. As Director of Research and Evaluation, Christine oversees a
> department that conducts research and evaluation studies related to
> various aspects of the Museum experience, but her passion and expertise
> focus on researching ways to advance the inclusion of people with
> disabilities in museum learning. Prior to her current position,
> Christine worked as a museum educator and an exhibit planner,
> specializing in the development of museums exhibitions and programs that
> are inclusive of people with disabilities.
>
> George Kerscher began his IT innovations in 1987 and coined the term
> "print disabled." George is dedicated to developing technologies that
> make information not only accessible, but also fully functional in the
> hands of persons who are blind or who have a print disability. He
> believes properly designed information systems can make all information
> accessible to all people and is working to push evolving technologies in
> this direction. As Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium and
> President of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), Kerscher
> is a recognized international leader in document access. In addition,
> Kerscher is the Senior Officer of Accessible Technology at Learning Ally
> in the USA. He chairs the DAISY/NISO Standards committee, and serves on
> the USA National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS)
> Board.
>
> As a child in the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind in
> 1949, John Boyer found that contemporary scientific material in braille
> was almost non-existent. John has never lost the sense of frustration he
> felt when the braille resources available to him were insufficient to
> satisfy his hunger for more science education. John believes that is the
> motive for his life*s work. He obtained a master's degree in Computer
> science, with a minor in electronics engineering at the University of
> Wisconsin in 1980. His first company was a Braille publishing enterprise
> which served an international client base. Abilitiessoft, Inc., his
> current company, creates open source adaptive software which makes Web
> pages available to blind persons through a Braille display. The current
> project, BrailleBlaster, will allow the integration of text with Braille
> graphics such as maps and graphs into a format accessible to blind
> people.
>
> Dr. Dimitri Kanevsky is a Research staff member in the Speech and
> Language Algorithms Department at the IBM T.J.Watson Research Center.
> Prior to joining IBM, he worked at a number of prestigious centers for
> higher mathematics, including the Max Planck Institute in Germany and
> the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1979, he
> invented a multi-channel vibration based hearing aid, and founded a
> company to produce and market this device. He also developed the first
> uses for speech recognition as a communication aid for deaf users over
> the telephone, for which he received an award from the National Search
> for Computing Applications from John Hopkins to Assist Persons with
> Disabilities. In 1998 Dr. Kanevsky introduced the first remote
> transcription stenographic services over the Internet, and created the
> ViaScribe product speech recognition concept and system that allows
> automatic transcription of lectures in real-time and the creation of
> multimedia notes. At IBM he has been responsible for developing the
> first Russian automatic speech recognition system, as well as key
> projects for embedding speech recognition in automobiles and broadcast
> transcription systems. He currently holds 152 US patents and was granted
> the title of Master Inventor IBM in 2002 , 2005 and 2010. His
> conversational biometrics based security patent was recognized by MIT,
> Technology Review Magazine, as one of five most influential patents for
> 2003. His work on Extended Baum-Welch algorithm in speech, another
> initiative for embedding speech recognition in automobiles and his work
> on conversational biometrics was recognized as science accomplishment
> in 2002 , 2004 and 2008 by the Director of Research at IBM . In 2005
> Dimitri Kanevsky received an Honorary degree (Doctor of Laws, honoris
> causa) from the University College of Cape Breton. He was elected a
> member of the Word Technology Network in 2004 and was a Chairperson of
> IT Software Technology session at Word Technology Network Summit 2005 in
> San-Francisco, Calif. He also organized a special session on Large Scale
> Optimization at ICASSP 2012 in Japan.
>
> Henry Wedler is a graduate student at the University of California,
> Davis, working towards his Ph.D. in organic chemistry. Inspired by
> programs offered by the National Federation of the Blind in high school
> and with encouragement from professors, colleagues and others, Henry
> gained the confidence to challenge and refute the mistaken belief that
> STEM fields are too visual and, therefore, impractical for blind people.
> Henry is not only following his own passion; he is working hard to
> develop the next generation of scientists by founding and teaching at an
> annual chemistry camp for blind and low-vision high school students.
> Chemistry Camp demonstrates to these students, by example and through
> practice, that their lack of eyesight should not hold them back from
> pursuing their dreams. Henry was nominated by Douglas Sprei of Learning
> Ally, a nonprofit that produces accessible audio textbooks for blind and
> learning disabled students, which is an indispensable resource that
> allowed him to excel in school.
>
> Sina Bahram is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at
> North Carolina State University. His field of research is Human
> Computer Interaction (HCI). Sina's primary interest is the dynamic
> translation of interfaces, with an emphasis on innovative environments
> being used by persons with visual impairment (PWVI) to facilitate
> learning, independence, and exploration. His other research interests
> focus on using AI inspired techniques to solve real-world user-centric
> problems. When he is not busy with his academic pursuits, Sina enjoys
> staying on the bleeding edge of technology and working with small,
> high-tech startup companies. Sina's passion for his field originally
> stems from the fact that he is mostly blind and uses assistive
> technologies such as a screen reader to navigate computer systems and
> technological devices. After experimenting in the fields of
> bioinformatics, privacy policy/law, and systems security, Sina
> discovered that his heart lies in helping users of all capabilities use
> computer systems more effectively and efficiently. He has worked in HCI
> full-time ever since.
>
>
>
>
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