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Anita Aaron
Anita Aaron is the executive director and CEO of the World Institute on Disability in Oakland, California, an international disability rights organization whose mission in communities and nations worldwide is to eliminate barriers to full social integration and increase employment, economic security and health care for persons with disabilities. From 1990-2009, Aaron served as CEO and Executive Director of the Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in San Francisco. She serves on a number of boards of directors including VisionServe Alliance, National Industries for the Blind and the National Association for Employment of People Who Are Blind.

Maryanne Diamond
Maryanne Diamond is the current president of the World Blind Union. She is employed by Vision Australia as general manager of International and Stakeholder Relations. She was also the inaugural CEO of the Australian Federation of Disability Organisations. Blind since birth, Diamond has held a range of positions on community, local, state, national and international boards and committees for more than 20 years. Currently, she is a board member of the Global Partnership for Disability and Development, member of the Steering Committee of the International Disability Alliance, executive member of the International Council for Education of People with Vision Impairment and member of the Australian Disability Development Consortium Policy Committee.

Jim Fruchterman
Jim Fruchterman is a leading social entrepreneur and CEO of Benetech, a nonprofit technology company based in Palo Alto, California, that focuses on creating new technology for people with disabilities, the human rights and environmental conservation communities. He is a former rocket scientist and has received a MacArthur Fellowship and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. One of Benetech’s major projects is Bookshare.org, which offers 60,000 books and 150 periodicals to people who are print disabled. A Hadley-Bookshare Library partnership enables Hadley’s U.S. students to access Bookshare’s information free of charge.

Penny Hartin
Penny Hartin is the CEO of the World Blind Union, which works on behalf of blind and visually impaired persons in 170 countries around the world. She has more than 25 years of senior management experience in planning and implementing rehabilitation and support services for blind persons in Canada through a variety of positions with CNIB and in five provinces. For six years, she represented the WBU on the first UN Panel of Experts to monitor the Standard Rules on the Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities. Hartin travels with her dog guide, Oliana.

Arnt Holte
Arnt Holte is the current first vice president of the World Blind Union. He is also the vice executive director and international director of the Norwegian Association of Blind and Partially Sighted (NABP). Holte has 19 years of senior management experience in planning and running fundraising activities and public awareness campaigns. Previous positions include marketing director and director of public awareness for NABP, CEO of the Norwegian Rheumatism Association and Norwegian Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Jim Kutsch
Dr. Jim Kutsch has served as president and CEO of The Seeing Eye in Morristown, New Jersey, since August 2006. A pioneer and innovator in dog guide services, The Seeing Eye provides specially bred and trained dogs to guide people who are blind and instructs blind people in the use and care of these dogs. Kutsch’s past positions include vice president of Strategic Technology at Convergys Labs and CIO of AT&T Universal Card Services. He was also a professor of Computer Science at West Virginia University. Kutsch serves as chairman of the board of National Industries for the Blind and served seven years on the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities. He designed and developed the first talking computer for blind computer users in 1975 as his doctoral dissertation research.

Urban Miyares
Urban Miyares, a blinded Vietnam veteran, is founder of the Disabled Businesspersons Association (DBA). An entrepreneur for more than 40 years and one of the nation’s leading authorities on self-employment for people with disabilities, Miyares helps people maximize their potential in the business world. Since 1985, the DBA, an international nonprofit organization, has assisted more than 12,000 people with disabilities develop and implement successful business practices. Miyares also provides business information, assistance and networking opportunities through his involvement with the Veterans Business Resource Center. He was the recipient of The Hadley School for the Blind’s President’s Award in 2009 for his service to the blindness community.

James Nyman
Dr. James Nyman was blinded in an explosion at age 11 and entered a residential school for the deaf and blind in Vancouver, British Columbia. There he found a mentor in teacher Arnold Alfred Archibald, who turned him from an "indifferent" student to one eager to learn. When Archibald retired in 1948, Nyman began supplementing his studies with courses from The Hadley School for the Blind. After graduation, Nyman worked for several years as a vendor in a government building. Upon Archibald’s death, his widow contacted Nyman about her late husband’s wishes to facilitate his entrance into the University of British Columbia. Four years later, Nyman graduated with honors with a degree in political science and entered graduate school at the University of California. He completed his doctorate in 1966 while teaching at the University of Chicago and three years later began teaching political science and philosophy at Trinity University in San Antonio. Nyman became the director of the Nebraska State Services for the Visually Impaired in 1974, retiring in 1998.

Lian Qin
Lian Qin is a successful blind business owner running a furniture import/export company in Beijing. Born visually impaired, she fought to remain in public school by appealing to the president of the China Disabled Persons’ Federation (CDPF). College opportunities were limited so she enrolled in a three-year medical massage therapy program designed for the visually impaired. After completing the program, she worked part-time as a massage therapist at the school and also taught braille part-time at the CDPF. As a result, she met a number of foreign women from Beijing’s embassy community who were seeking the services of a female massage therapist. To enhance her abilities, Qin began learning English. Many of her textbooks and lessons came from Hadley. Her rapidly developing language skills took her into a new arena and, before long, she was employed frequently as an interpreter for various foreign officials and their wives and staff who needed an assistant fluent in Chinese and English. During her work for the Columbian Embassy, she soon found herself assisting with the purchase of furniture for its diplomatic offices. Qin became intrigued with the furniture business and, with the help of the many contacts she had made, soon had her own store across from the U.S. Embassy. Today, she employs 75 people and is actively running her own top quality furniture manufacturing, marketing and sales operation, with demand for her product line in China, as well as Europe and North and South America. She has a retail/wholesale outlet in Seattle.

Avraham Rabby
Rami Rabby, although born blind in Israel, has spent much of his life in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. In 2007, he retired from the U.S. diplomatic service, after completing political and public diplomacy assignments at American embassies and missions in London, South Africa, Peru, the United Nations, India and Trinidad and Tobago. He is currently a consultant and workshop leader on career planning, job search strategies and employment. Rabby is the co-author of Take Charge: A Strategic Guide For Blind Job Seekers. A Fulbright Scholar, he received a bachelor’s degree in French and Spanish from Oxford University and a master’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Chicago. Rabby is a long-standing member and former vice president of the National Federation of the Blind and is a member of the international advisory board of Perkins School for the Blind in Boston.

James Sanders
Jim Sanders is a fully bilingual senior executive who has extensive leadership and management experience in four Canadian provinces and at national and international levels. An innovative leader whose 40+ year career has been dedicated to breaking down barriers for people with vision loss around the globe, culminated in serving as the president and CEO of the CNIB, a federally chartered, 90-year-old national charitable organization. Sanders authored "The Right to Know," a seminal report that resulted in the establishment of the National Broadcast Reading Service, a key source of accessible news and information for Canadians with print disabilities. He served as president of the North America/Caribbean region of the World Blind Union from 2000-2004 and received the Canadian Helen Keller Award in 2007.

Lawrence Scadden
Dr. Larry Scadden, trained as a research scientist, spent 40 years working to improve the lives of people with disabilities through the use of appropriate technology. Now retired, Scadden served as director of Technology Application Programs for the Electronic Industries Foundation. There he developed guidelines for consumer electronic products that make them usable by people with disabilities and functional limitations. Scadden accepted two appointments to the federal government, serving as deputy director of the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research and later as acting director. He was subsequently recruited by the National Science Foundation to serve as senior program director where he established and managed the program for Persons with Disabilities. Scadden has more than 100 professional and scientific publications to his name and received numerous honors including the Migel Medal from the American Foundation for the Blind. He is the author of "Surpassing Expectations: My Life without Sight."

Leslie Stocker
Les Stocker has been on staff of the Braille Institute for 30 years, serving as director of financial development, assistant executive director and, for the last 15 years, as president. He is also past president of VisionServe Alliance. Prior to joining the Braille Institute, Stocker had an eight-year career on the faculty and administration of Ambassador College in Pasadena, California, where he received his bachelor’s degree. Stocker has a master’s degree in communications from California State University at Fullerton and is currently an active student in the EMBA program at the Peter F. Drucker School of Business Management at Claremont Graduate University.