Local Disability Advocate Appointed Council Member by President Obama

President Obama has appointed Katherine D. Seelman, Ph.D. to the National Council on Disability (NCD).　The NCD is composed of 15 members who advise the President on disability matters.　Dr. Seelman is associate dean of disability programs and professor of rehabilitation science and technology at the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Pittsburgh. She holds secondary appointments in the School of Public Health and the Center for Bioethics, an adjunct position at Xian Jiatong University, China and is senior policy adviser for the National Science Foundation-supported Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center. She was the recipient of the University of Pittsburgh Chancellor’s Distinguished Service Award in 2007. Dr. Seelman, who is hard-of-hearing, serves as adviser to the University’s Students for Disability Advocacy and is co-chair of the City of Pittsburgh-Allegheny County Task Force on Disability. She was one of two from the U.S. serving on the World Health Organization’s 9-member international editorial committee to guide the development of the first World Report on Disability and presented a chapter of the Report, for which she was a principal author in 2011 at the United Nations. During the Clinton Administration, she served for seven years as the Director of the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research in Washington, D.C. She is widely published and the recipient of many awards.