DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology)

For the last dozen or so years my colleague Sheryl Burgstahler has been at the forefront of making sure that computing and networking technology is accessible to people of all sorts of abilities. She founded and has continued to manage (including finding funding for continuing) the DO-IT program, which among other efforts brings a group of disabled high-school students onto the University of Washington campus for two week every summer to take classes in technology and science. Sheryl's got a paper on the program here, and there's a nice article about DO-IT in todays Seattle PI.

More than 90 percent of DO-IT participants go on to complete college, she said. Program alumni include a blind student who earned a Rhodes Scholarship and another, largely paralyzed from the neck down, now enrolled at Harvard, Burgstahler said.

Sheryl's devotion, talent, and amazing energy have made a real different in hundreds of kids lives over the years, and it's an honor to get to work with her.