The Office of Student Accommodations recognizes faculty and staff who have gone out of their way to make WVU a more accessible place for students with Disabilities. This distinction is voted on each spring by OSA staff. If you are a student who wishes to nominate a faculty member for consideration, please contact us with a short blurb describing your faculty member's exceptional contributions to accessibility.
2023-2024
Rodney Adlington, IT Operations Manager, WVU Libraries
“For years, Rodney Adlington has tirelessly assisted us in optimizing MediaSite as a tool for use with OSA’s Work-Study Closed Captioning Unit, meeting with us and the with the vendor on numerous occasions, answering all of our questions, and working behind the scenes to troubleshoot issues as they arose. As a result, we have been able to securely process videos that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to caption, and this makes life easier on our captioners and ensures that students have high-quality closed captioning on their course videos.”
Rick Bebout, Technology Manager, Reed College of Media
“Rick Bebout has been a long-time supporter of accessibility by helping to ensure that Integrated Marketing video content is always provided in an appropriate format for captioning, each year. This includes not only required course content but supplemental materials, as well. Rick has probably helped process dozens, if not hundreds, of videos. The impact for the closed captioning team has been significant, making our work a lot easier. As a result, we have been able to ensure that students in this program have high-quality closed captioning in their courses.”
Rachael Conrad, Assistant Director of Employer Relations, Career Services
“We can’t say enough about Rachael Conrad and Danica Ryan. This past spring, they spearheaded a collaboration between our Office and Career Services that brought major employers from Deloitte, Southwest Airlines, and Proctor & Gamble to campus for our first-ever transition event, Demystifying Disability. This was a popular offering for students in our Office, and the opportunity to ask questions and have them answered by employers was huge for many of our students who are approaching the end of their academic journey at WVU. Rachael and Danica met with us regularly, contacted the employers, set up the event, and helped to promote it, and the turnout was great. We wouldn’t have been able to pull this off without them.”
Anna Gravelin Coy, Assistant Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, School of Medicine
“Dr. Anna Gravelin Coy supported the success of her student and also worked closely with OSA’s transcribing team to guide our understanding of how to appropriately provide captioning for her very specialized Phonetics class, in alignment with technical standards. Phonetics is a notoriously difficult subject to transcribe because there are no standard spellings for certain utterances (at least none available within our transcribing software). Rather than being resistant to services, Anna was very hands on, making sure we had all the info we needed to accurately convey the course content, especially in cases where rendering certain sounds might give away the answer (or accidentally lead the student to a wrong answer). Her contributions made our work better, and she was always thoughtful about how to guide our services in a way that made the subject matter accessible.”
Tammy Honesty, Associate Professor of Scene Design, School of Theatre and Dance
“Professor Tammy Honesty worked with one of the students in the Autism Support Program in the Fall 2023 semester. From Day 1, after meeting the student and discussing their accommodations, she reached out to see what more she could do to help support the student, to gather best practices for working with students with ASD, and to collect any additional resources she could share with her colleagues. She advocated for the best interest of the student, even when it was difficult, she created a dialogue with her colleagues about presuming competence, and she worked hard to make the student felt safe, seen, and heard in her class.”
Dana Huebert Lima, Teaching Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies, Department of Biology
“Dr. Dana Huebert Lima is the definition of an advocate, and she is a faculty member at the forefront of advocating for students' needs. Dana has gone out of her way, year after year, to ensure that Biology classes are accessible—not only her classes but the classes taught by other instructors and TAs in her unit. She has been especially committed to having all of her video content captioned, and during COVID, she went out of her way to find novel solutions when mask requirements made it difficult for students who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing to read lips. This past year, a student in the Autism Support Program was struggling in their courses during the Fall semester. Dana offered to serve as an advocate for that student with other professors (including other faculty members outside of her department). She worked with the student and the course TA to better support the student. Toward the end of the semester, this same student faced a traumatic incident; Dana led with compassion and empathy to support the student however she could, above and beyond their reasonable accommodations. Semester-after-semester, Dana has reached out seeking guidance in making her classes more accessible, and it is clear that she looks at accessibility as more than just a matter of institutional compliance.”
Sharon Martin, Vice President for University Engagement and CMO
“Sharon Martin is an incredible advocate and supporter of WVU’s Autism Support Program. From the start of the program, she has gone above and beyond to support our program and our students. She has assisted in connecting us with important stakeholders and other Centers across campus, and she has helped to ensure our program has what it needs to be successful. I do not believe WVU ASP would be where it is at this point in time without her. She is at the forefront of creating change here on campus to make WVU a more accessible and affirming institution for students who are neurodiverse.”
Renée Nicholson, Director, WVU Humanities Center
“Renée Nicholson has been an exceptional advocate for students with Disabilities at WVU. A longtime supporter of OSA, she has arranged events for our Office (such as the Humanities Center meet-and-greet with OSA students and Blind author J.T. Hill). She has also created funding opportunities for us (writing our Captioning and Interpreting Team into her Narrative Medicine grant in order to compensate us for providing transcribing services). And she has always promoted OSA events (she connected us with Career Services when we were looking for a partner for our Demystifying Disability career panel, and she then promoted that event through her Humanities Center newsletter). Recently, she has been collaborating with us on the upcoming Deaf Deaf World event in September, and we cannot express our gratitude strongly enough for all the advice and support she has offered.”
Danica Ryan, Career Development Specialist, Career Services
“We can’t say enough about Danica Ryan and Rachael Conrad. This past spring, they spearheaded a collaboration between our Office and Career Services that brought major employers from Deloitte, Southwest Airlines, and Proctor & Gamble to campus for our first-ever transition event, Demystifying Disability. This was a popular offering for students in our Office, and the opportunity to ask questions and have them answered by employers was huge for many of our students who are approaching the end of their academic journey at WVU. Danica and Rachael met with us regularly, contacted the employers, set up the event, and helped to promote it, and the turnout was great. We wouldn’t have been able to do this without them.”
Chris Schmoldt, Interim Director, Mountainlair
“Chris Schmoldt is one of the major reasons we were able to install a Sensory Room at the Mountainlair for neurodiverse students. He was eager and excited to collaborate with us to make this happen. He also assisted with ensuring there was a Sensory Friendly space available at every UpAllNight event this year. He has been an awesome collaborator and advocate to ensure we are creating spaces for our neurodiverse students here on campus.”
2015-2016*
Cassandra Pritts, Associate Professor and Chairperson, Department of History—Potomac State College
(*previously named “Commitment to Communication Access Award”)
Note: all listings reflect the awardee's position and title at the time of the award.