The Team
Dr. Deana McDonagh
Director of Serious Fun
Dr Deana McDonagh is Professor (Industrial Design) in the School of Art and Design and founder of the (dis)Ability Design Studio at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. She is a Health Innovation Professor at the Carle Illinois School of Medicine and is bringing empathic modeling into the training of medical students to experience disability from a personal perspective to support patient-inspired innovation. She is an Empathic Design Research Strategist who focuses on enhancing quality of life for all through more intuitive and meaningful products, leading to emotional sustainability. She concentrates on the emotional user-product relationships and how empathy can bring the designer closer to users’ authentic needs, ensuring both functional and emotional needs are met by products.
She is part of the Research and Development team at Innsight Technology Inc. A company is dedicated to translational research initiatives that will advance diagnostics and evaluation of eye and systemic disease. Our primary focus is to provide an objective measurement of tear fluid biomarkers to standardize treatment solutions not only for dry eye but for systemic disease. We are an innovative tear fluid analytic company enabling detection of hard to diagnose diseases by collecting and analyzing tear fluid in a non-invasive way.
Carle Illinois College of Medicine
Coach Adam Bleakney
Director of Awesome
Adam Bleakney has served as the Head Coach of the University of Illinois Wheelchair Track and Road Racing team since 2005. In that time his athletes have won 55 medals across four Paralympic Games while setting 14 world records on the track, and have won the Boston Marathon, London Marathon, Chicago Marathon, and NY City Marathon. In recognition of such performances, he has been named the USOPC U.S. Paralympic Coach of the Year on three occasions.
In 2017, he established the UIUC Human Performance and Mobility Maker Lab, an interdisciplinary lab where students with and without disabilities collaborate to design and develop assistive technology. Adam is faculty in the School of Art + Design at UIUC and a research affiliate at the UIUC Beckman Institute. Adam has consulted with BMW, Toyota, Bridgestone Americas, and several Champaign-based start-ups in advancing racing wheelchair and other accessible technology research and development initiatives.
Dr. Susann Heft Sears
Director of Enriching Life Experiences
Dr. Sear is the Director of Beckwith Residential Community that is located on the first floor of Nugent Hall and is a cooperative venture between the Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES) at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign campus. This community is dedicated to accommodating students with severe physical disabilities and to help you transition to independent living.
She is also Associate Director of the Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES). The mission is to ensure that qualified individuals with disabilities are afforded an equal opportunity to participate in and benefit from the programs, services and activities of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign through the identification and enactment of reasonable modifications to institutional policies and procedures, the provision of effective auxiliary aids and services, the establishment of innovative educational services, and the pursuit of interdisciplinary disability research.