BBI Staff
Deepti Samant, M.S. (Rehab), M.S. (ECE),
Senior Research Associate
Deepti Samant is a Senior Research Associate at the Burton Blatt Institute (BBI). Her research interests focus on social policy and civil society engagement for people with disabilities, program design for enhancing employment opportunities, and strategies to promote assistive technology access and utilization in developing and under-developed countries.
As a Senior Research Associate at BBI, Ms. Samant has participated in instrument design, data collection, and data analysis on multiple studies such as the impact of corporate practices on the employment of persons with disabilities, evaluation of a technical assistance center on self-employment, emergency preparedness and response issues for persons with disabilities, and assessing needs of independent living centers in the state of New York.
From 2005-2006, she served on the Developmental Disabilities Advisory Committee for the PACE Center for Independent Living in Urbana, IL. She is passionately interested in advancing the empowerment and independence of people with disabilities through social and attitudinal changes in developing nations, and has investigated policy and systemic failures in increasing the employment of Indians with disabilities.
Ms. Samant has published articles on technological accessibility, distance education, and employment, and recently presented at the annual conferences of the Society for Disability Studies (SDS) and the Pacific Rim on the practical implications of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on legal capacity and employment outcomes focusing on countries with low-resources.
Ms. Samant has earned a Master of Science in Rehabilitation Counseling (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (University of California–Irvine), and a Bachelor’s in Telecommunication Engineering (University of Mumbai). She has professional experience in the fields of vocational counseling, website accessibility, and independent living.
Curricula Vita
Vita: D. Samant (Word format) | Vita: D. Samant (PDF format)
Selected Publications
- Accessible Cyberinfrastructure-enabled Knowledge Communities in the Disability Community (2007).
William N. Myhill, Derrick L. Cogburn, Deepti Samant, Benjamin Addom, & Peter Blanck.
18 Assistive Technology Journal (forthcoming 2008). - Employment of People with Disabilities: Twenty-five Years Back and Ahead.
Peter Blanck, Meera Adya, William N. Myhill, Deepti Samant, & Pei-Chun Chen.
25 Law & Inequality 323 (2007). - Distance Education Initiatives and Their Early 21st Century Role in the Lives of People with Disabilities.
William N. Myhill, Deepti Samant, David Klein, Shelley Kaplan, María Verónica Reina, & Peter Blanck.
In Focus on Distance Education Developments (Edward P. Bailey, ed., Nova Science Publishers, 2007)
Word format [.doc]
