[nfbwatlk] Champions of change

Sat May 5 17:52:39 UTC 2012

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of Communications

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 7, 2012

White House Highlights STEM Innovators in the Disability Community as
"Champions of Change"

WASHINGTON, DC - On Monday, May 7th, the White House will honor 14
individuals as Champions of Change for leading the fields of science,
technology, engineering, and math for people with disabilities in education
and employment.

"STEM is vital to America's future in education and employment, so equal
access for people with disabilities is imperative, as they can contribute to
and benefit from STEM," said Kareem Dale, Special Assistant to the President
for Disability Policy. "The leaders we've selected as Champions of Change
are proving that when the playing field is level, people with disabilities
can excel in STEM, develop new products, create scientific inventions, open
successful businesses, and contribute equally to the economic and
educational future of our country."

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 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 world's 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.

Becky Frankeberger
Butterfly Knitting

Custom-made knit throws, shawls, and more!

Phone: 360-426-8389
E-mail: becky at ButterflyKnitting.com
Website: www.ButterflyKnitting.com