65389profile13020266681418327852<![CDATA[Karen Milchus]]>
Karen Milchus is co-director of the national Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Workplace Accommodations, funded by NIDRR. She specializes in identifying and providing educational and vocational accommodations to youth and adults with disabilities, with a particular focus on computer access solutions.
Related to her interest in workplace accommodations, Ms. Milchus is the PI for a grant to develop an expert system to recommend workplace accommodations, recently finished work on an NSF project that investigated the accommodation needs of teachers with disabilities, and was the PI for CATEA's work on Tech Connections, a NIDRR-funded information dissemination project on assistive technology for rehabilitation counselors.
Related to her interest in educational accommodations, Ms. Milchus has led projects supported by the National Science Foundation to disseminate information on how to make science experiments accessible to students with disabilities.
Prior to joining CATEA in 1994, Ms. Milchus worked as a rehabilitation technologist at the University of Wisconsin-Stout in what is now the Assistive Technology and Assessment Center. While there, she co-authored Wisconsin's procedural manual on transporting students with special needs. Her Master's research was on providing supplementary force feedback to the upper extremity neuroprosthesis developed by the Cleveland FES Center.
Ms. Milchus is a former Assistive Technology Practitioner (ATP) and is active in RESNA.
Education:
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, M.S. in Biomedical Engineering
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering
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disability; assistive technology; workplace accommodations; educational accommodations; computer access]]>Ms. Milchus is currently teaching several classes as part of Georgia Tech's Professional Education Program on Assistive Technology and Environmental Access]]>Research interests include:
Workplace accommodations for people with disabilities:
Co-Director of the RERC on Workplace Accommodations;
PI of the Workplace Accommodation Wizard project which will develop an assessment tool for employers
Recently completed an NSF project to study the workplace accommodation needs of science and math teachers with disabilities.
Technology to make science and math courses accessible to students with disabilities, particularly high school chemistry and physics classes (some of which has been incorporated into the SciTrain web site)
Computer access for employees and students with disabilities; interest in technology to assist individuals with learning disabilities.