Rafael San Miguel Honored as a White House Champion for Change

Champion of Change

Posted on:  May 08 2012

White House recognizes Coca-Cola scientist Rafael San Miguel, who is
deaf, for inspiring young people to pursue careers in science and math

Rafael San Miguel, a senior flavor chemist and sweetener scientist at
The Coca-Cola Company, was honored this week by the White House as a
“Champion of Change” for providing education and employment
opportunities in the fields of science, technology, engineering
and math (STEM) for people with disabilities.

 

Rafael San Miguel has worked at Coca-Cola for more than 23 years as a flavor chemist and sweetener scientist.

San Miguel, who has been profoundly deaf since infancy, has dedicated
much of his life to inspiring young people to pursue careers in science
and math – and creating awareness about disability by focusing on
ability.

In 2004, he and his wife, Betsy, worked with then-Mayor Shirley Franklin
to bring the concept of integrated playgrounds to Atlanta.

“I became passionate about this need, not only to allow kids of all
abilities to be able to be active and enjoy play, but also because I
quickly realized the profound and positive impact the experience could
have on kids without disability,” he said. “I saw
how it could shape their future perception of disability.”

He continues, “I realized for the first time that if people who have
trouble working alongside someone with a disability had grown up
alongside someone with a disability in this way, then they would
certainly have a different perspective.”

During a meeting with the Labor Department in 2008, San Miguel was told
how rare it was for someone with a major disability to achieve
mainstream corporate success, especially in science.

“The science learning gap is highest among kids with disability, which
is doubly tragic given that science is a specific area where – in many
cases – they are better suited to excel than their non-disabled peers,”
he said.

Making science fun

Inspired to make a difference, he developed a series of science
experiments that were fun, interactive and educational. He presented
them to Drew Charter School in Atlanta’s East Lake community, which had
gone from one of the worst in the state to one of the
best as a direct result of building a community that supported
education.

San Miguel continues to visit elementary and middle schools – both in
Atlanta and in other cities during his business travels – to teach,
excite and inspire kids. A volunteer network called Points of Light
connects him with underserved schools.

     

To help address the country’s science deficit, San Miguel developed a
series of fun, interactive and educational experiments. He visits
underserved elementary and middle schools in Atlanta and in other cities
around the country to teach and inspire kids.

He takes pride in opening young people’s eyes – and minds – to science.
He recalled visiting one middle school in Washington, D.C., where the
library had fewer books than he had in his office and most students had
landed after being largely unsuccessful at
other schools.

“When I began to speak to them, the kindest thing I can say is they were
rude,” he said. “They couldn’t figure out why my voice sounded a little
different, and I could tell it was all they could do not to ridicule my
disability.

“But as I began to teach them about science, they gradually became more
and more engaged. I quickly realized by their answers to my questions
that many of them were really smart.”

Students who were the most disinterested at first ending up approaching
him after class to ask how they could learn more about science.


After finishing his experiments, San Miguel asked the students if they
thought science was cool. Every hand quickly shot up. He then asked what
they wanted to be when they grew up.

“A scientist for The Coca-Cola Company!” was everyone’s response.

 

San Miguel began his career as a scientist at NASA, where he worked on a
project to send the first can of Coca-Cola into outer space.


‘Limitless ability, not a limiting disability’

Due to a wrong dose of antibiotics, San Miguel lost his hearing when he
was only a few days old. At the St. Joseph’s Institute for the Deaf in
St. Louis, he learned to speak by feeling vibrations on someone’s
throat. After graduating from the all-hearing Chaminade
Prep School in St. Louis, he attended Texas A&M.

“I got through college without the use of an interpreter primarily
because I was surrounded by a community of people eager to step up and
lend a hand by taking lecture notes for me in class,” he said.

He began his career as a scientist at NASA. Like many kids, he’d always
wanting to be an astronaut, but soon realized he couldn’t because of his
disability.

What he could do, however, was join the Space Shuttle program as a
scientist. His work developing food for astronauts, interestingly,
involved a project to send the first can of Coca-Cola into outer space.

“This was ironic,” he said, “since I would soon find myself working for The Coca-Cola Company – now for over 23 years.”

“I’m fortunate to work for a company led by a CEO who has for decades in
his personal life devoted himself to causes empowering those with
disability, such as Special Olympics. And I’m lucky to work for two
great bosses who support me in my science work and
have chosen to see me as someone with limitless ability rather than a
limiting disability.”

Filling the science deficit

For seven years, San Miguel has served as an active board member of the
Bobby Dodd Institute in Atlanta, a nonprofit organization that trains
individuals with a wide range of disabilities, from intellectual
disabilities to mobility impairments, and creates
job opportunities for them. Today, he also serves on the board of the
Atlanta Speech School, which focuses on meeting the needs of students
with speech and language-based disabilities. And he’s designing the U.S.
Science Project, which connects scientists
with schools through existing volunteer networks to inspire young
people to pursue educational and employment opportunities in STEM.

“Volunteer service has always been the driving force behind solving the
world’s most challenging problems,” he said. “I believe every person is a
champion with the courage and optimism to think they can do something
to make a difference and change the status
quo in their community.”

San Miguel was recognized as a Champion of Change on Monday during a
ceremony at the White House. He said he was humbled by – and extremely
proud of – the honor.

“I’m fortunate to work for a company led by a CEO who has for decades in
his personal life devoted himself to causes empowering those with
disability, such as Special Olympics,” he said. “And I’m lucky to work
for two great bosses who support me in my science
work and have chosen to see me as someone with limitless ability rather
than a limiting disability.”







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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.



The White House "Champions of Change" are:



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.





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.





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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