Charity Pitcher-Cooper

Pronouns: she/her I joined The Smith-Kettlewell Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) team in 2017 as an assistant to scientist Dr. Joshua Miele. My 20 years of nursing experience in maternal and child health, as well as course work in early childhood education led to my interest in working with Dr. Arvind Chandna with SeeLab's cerebral visual impairment (CVI) research project. Currently I facilitate a research advocacy group of clinicians, parents, TVIs, and SKERI researchers related to cerebral visual impairment, CVI@SKI, and assist in administration of the Higher Vision Function Question Inventory (HVFQI). In addition to my work with CVI, I manage YouDescribe (a free tool for anyone to add audio description to YouTube videos). As a trained audio describer for YouDescribe, I view and critique videos, support volunteer describers one on one with personalized tutorials, and teach group audio description classes for new volunteers looking to get started. I also support a new study currently in the development stage with Dr. Giovanni Fusco for tScratch, a Universal Design for Learning informed tactile interface for teaching Scratch, a beginning coding language.