Congratulations to all 2026 recipients!
Student: Amy Janis
Organization: Delta Gamma
Staff: Beatriz Castro Bohorquez
and Sarah Reifel
Faculty: Dr. Eckhard Groll
Special Recognition: Purdue IT, Purdue Brand Studio,
and ADA Instructional Material System Project Team
2026 RECIPIENTS BIOS
Purdue University’s School of Mechanical Engineering is both one of the largest mechanical engineering schools in the nation and one of the oldest engineering schools on Purdue’s campus. ME strives to set the standard for what the University represents to students, faculty, alumni, and the world. For decades, however, its physical home told a different story.
According to Dr. Groll’s nomination, the ME Building is not one structure but five — a patchwork of connected buildings constructed across different eras, from 1929 to 2012. The result was a facility that seemed to fall short of 21st-century standards for accessibility. Its sole elevator — a repurposed cargo shaft tucked in a back hallway — required wheelchair users to traverse nearly the full length of the building twice just to reach their destination. For an institution that prides itself on welcoming every student and visitor, these were not minor inconveniences but everyday challenges.
After becoming the Head of the School of Mechanical Engineering in 2019, Dr. Groll found these conditions unacceptable — and said so. Recognizing that the building’s deficiencies undermined the School’s reputation and its commitment to all people, he launched an ambitious fundraising campaign to fully renovate the 100-year-old facility. Through tireless outreach to alumni and close collaboration with the Purdue for Life development team, Dr. Groll secured $22.5 million in private donations, enabling a $25 million renovation project with Purdue University contributing the remaining funds.
The ME Building Renovation Project broke ground in September 2023 and was completed in time for the start of classes in August 2025. From the outset, faculty, staff, and students were engaged for input and feedback before a single wall came down. Throughout construction, the team collaborated with Purdue Facilities, architects, designers, and multiple construction companies and vendors to ensure every decision reflected the School’s values.
The transformation is comprehensive. A prominent ramped front entrance with automatic doors now welcomes visitors at the main approach, accompanied by a modern elevator serving every floor. Brand-new men’s and women’s restrooms were installed on each floor, with a family restroom added at ground level. Classroom placement was rethought entirely: most instructional spaces were relocated to the ground and first floors, reducing travel time, improving student flow, and ensuring that no student faces unnecessary barriers to learning.
The renovated ME Building is more than a construction achievement — it is a statement of values made permanent in stone, steel, and glass. Under Dr. Groll’s leadership, and through the efforts of a broad, dedicated team, Mechanical Engineering now has a home that reflects the excellence it stands for. As goes ME, so goes Purdue — and ME has never looked more welcoming to all.
Purdue is proud to have Dr. Eckhard Groll as a faculty member and departmental leader and to honor him with a 2026 Focus Award.
Amy Janis is a Ph.D. student in Purdue’s Department of Human Development and Family Science. Amy has made accessibility a driving force in her work across the University, touching classrooms, laboratories, and physical spaces alike. According to her nominator, what distinguishes Amy is not simply her commitment to these values, but her capacity to translate them into lasting, structural change.
Since Summer 2023, Amy has co-led bi-annual workshops on neurodiversity-informed teaching through Purdue’s Disability Resource Center, reaching more than 150 faculty and staff. These workshops emphasize practical strategies including multiple instructional modalities, closed captioning, and streamlined one-page syllabi. Building on this work, she is co-leading the development of a neuro-inclusive teaching packet – designed for distribution across 100 Purdue classrooms – that will embed these practices into the everyday fabric of instruction far beyond her home department.
Amy applies these same inclusive principles in her own teaching and mentorship. As a teaching assistant, she has served more than 250 undergraduate students and has guest lectured in courses focused on neurodiversity and disability. Through the support she provides as a TA, she consistently challenges students to examine how classroom norms and instructional practices shape participation for individuals with disabilities, encouraging not just awareness, but a culture of advocacy.
Within the Sleep and Developmental Studies Laboratory, Amy has been instrumental in building and sustaining an accessible environment for a rotating cohort of 8 to 16 undergraduate researchers each semester, among whom neurodivergent students consistently represent a significant share. One nominator shared that she is a reliable, proactive voice at weekly lab meetings for the needs of neurodiverse members: listening when they have concerns, acting when they need support, and advocating for change. Her mentorship centers on self-advocacy, helping students identify barriers, articulate their needs, and navigate academic environments with confidence. The goal she holds for every student is that they leave with a clearly identified strength to carry into their next chapter, whether in education or their career.
Amy’s commitment to removing barriers extends to the physical environment. When student feedback revealed that the lab’s physical workspace presented challenges for daily work, she helped build a solution. Co-leading the Inclusive Space Project, she secured grant funding to redesign four undergraduate research laboratories across Purdue, benefiting 35 students in a single semester. The project applied evidence-based design principles to create flexible, sensory-considerate workspaces that better support physical accessibility and neurodivergent needs. Crucially, students were not passive beneficiaries of the project; they were active leaders and participants throughout the process of shaping their own research environments.
Amy embodies the spirit of the Focus Award in the fullest sense. As a busy doctoral student, she has chosen to look outward by finding every available avenue to make Purdue more accessible. Her impact is already measurable in the classrooms she has transformed, the students she has empowered, and the spaces she has redesigned.
Purdue is proud to have Amy Janis as a student and to honor her with a 2026 Focus Award.
Dr. Beatriz Castro is a Lecturer in the Department of Biological Sciences, and team lead of the LearnerX Lab at Purdue University, where she has transformed how accessibility is understood and practiced in large-enrollment STEM education. Each year, her human anatomy and physiology courses reach more than 1,100 students — and for every one of them, Dr. Castro has worked to ensure that learning is not just possible, but genuinely welcoming. Her guiding belief is simple and powerful: accessibility is not an add-on. It is the foundation of effective teaching.
That belief shows up in everything she builds. Her courses offer the same core content through a rich array of formats — custom HTML- and JavaScript-based notecards and quizzes, interactive eBooks, high-contrast visual lecture slides, AI-narrated audio notes, and H5P homework assignments redesigned to work seamlessly with screen readers. Every lecture is recorded and available the same day, and within 24 hours a teaching assistant manually reviews and corrects the captions to ensure 100% accuracy. This is the kind of care that makes a real difference for students who depend on precise, reliable access to learn.
Her innovation in multimodal content delivery, which measurably improved student satisfaction and learning outcomes in large-enrollment STEM courses, earned her the Class of 1922 Outstanding Teaching Innovation Award (Spring 2024) and induction into the Purdue Teaching Academy. Building on this foundation, she expanded her efforts to focus more intentionally on scalable accessibility and inclusive design — extending her impact well beyond her own classroom. Through the LearnerX Lab, Dr. Castro trains ten undergraduate students in accessible design — embedding these values in the next generation of educators and course developers.
She has developed and shared an accessibility-compliant PowerPoint template and a detailed implementation protocol with the Department of Biological Sciences and Purdue’s Center for Instructional Excellence. As part of her Purdue Teaching Leadership Award, she is producing instructional videos that make her instructional tools and design frameworks available to peers, providing actionable guidance for creating accessible course materials.
Purdue is proud to have Dr. Castro Bohorquez as a staff member and to honor her with a 2026 Focus Award.
Sarah Reifel is an Instructional Designer in the Libraries and School of Information Studies at Purdue University, where her work sits at the intersection of learning design, equal access to digital content, and organizational leadership. Sarah has become one of the libraries’ most consequential contributors to institutional change — a fact made all the more remarkable by the urgency and complexity of the challenge she chose to take on.
In April 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a rule requiring all state and local governments — including academic institutions — to bring their web content and mobile applications into full accessibility compliance by April 24, 2026. For academic libraries, which make especially large volumes of digital content available to users and the public, this ruling carries enormous implications. Sarah alone oversees more than 500 research and course guides, representing only a fraction of the Library’s total digital footprint. Sarah recognized the significance of the ruling almost immediately after its announcement. Rather than waiting for directions from above, she brought the deadline to the Libraries’ attention herself and began coordinating with colleagues on the necessary next steps.
Her initiative gave rise to the Libraries Accessibility Working Group, established in Fall 2024, with Sarah serving as chair. Charged with advancing accessible content, programs, services, and experiences for both users and Libraries employees, the working group has placed a primary focus on digital accessibility — a complex, technically demanding, and nuanced endeavor. Under Sarah’s thoughtful leadership, the group developed and implemented a comprehensive action plan with clear timelines and milestones extending through and beyond the April 2026 compliance deadline.
The scope of Sarah’s contributions under this initiative is broad and substantive. She has championed a cultural shift toward born-accessible content creation through strategic communication. She led the development of baseline digital accessibility skills and training designed to empower all Libraries employees — regardless of technical background – resulting in the Digital Accessibility Skills Guide, an openly available online resource that extends the Libraries’ impact beyond its own walls. And she has helped coordinate specialized training in the remediation of complex formats including PDFs, GIS data, and more.
Beyond the working group itself, Sarah continues to make an outsized impact across the Libraries and the School of Information Studies. She has built user-centered support structures and consulted directly with unit leaders on remediation workflows, ensuring that accessibility is embedded into everyday operations rather than treated as a one-time compliance exercise. Her approach reflects a conviction that accessibility must be woven into culture, strategy, and outcomes — and her results bear that out.
Sarah’s commitment to digital accessibility has transformed both practice and culture at Purdue Libraries, creating lasting benefit for users, colleagues, and the broader University community. She is a model of what proactive, principle-driven leadership looks like.
Purdue is proud to have Sarah Reifel as a staff member and to honor her with a 2026 Focus Award.
In Fall 2025, the Purdue chapter of Delta Gamma brought its national philanthropy, Service for Sight — a commitment to supporting individuals with visual impairments and promoting accessibility in their communities, to life in a way that was immediate, personal, and profoundly impactful: by standing alongside a blind first-year student as he took his first steps into college life at Purdue.
Recognizing that navigating an unfamiliar campus presents unique challenges for a student with a visual impairment, Delta Gamma members organized a consistent, reliable system of weekly walking partners to accompany the student to and from his classes. The effort was thoughtfully structured to ensure continuity — not a one-time gesture, but a dependable presence he could count on throughout the semester. What began as a logistical support quickly became something far more meaningful: a source of connection, confidence, and community during one of the most significant transitions of a young person’s life.
The impact of Delta Gamma’s involvement resonated far beyond campus. The student’s family expressed deep gratitude for the chapter’s commitment, noting through his high school guidance counselor that their support made his transition to Purdue not only safer, but genuinely more enjoyable and socially rich. The chapter’s members helped him form friendships, build comfort, and engage with campus life in ways that would have been far harder to achieve alone. He did not simply survive his first semester — he thrived, academically and socially, in no small part because of the community Delta Gamma helped create around him.
What further distinguishes Delta Gamma’s efforts is their staying power. The chapter did not step back when the semester ended. Their support has continued into Spring 2026, and the chapter is actively collaborating with Purdue’s Disability Resource Center to explore new partnership opportunities and expand their reach. This sustained commitment makes clear that their involvement was never a program or a project with a finish line — it reflects a genuine, ongoing investment in accessibility and student belonging at Purdue.
Through their initiative, reliability, and authentic care, the Purdue chapter of Delta Gamma has demonstrated what proactive, student-centered accessibility looks like in practice. They did not wait to be asked. They identified a need, built a solution, and showed up — week after week. In doing so, they have made a lasting contribution to Purdue’s commitment to equal access and affirmed a simple truth: that providing access, at its best, is not a policy. It is a choice that people make for one another, every day.
Purdue is proud to have Delta Gamma as part of its community and to honor them with a 2026 Focus Award.
In April 2024, the Department of Justice published their final rule updating Title II of the American with Disabilities Act to ensure that web content and mobile applications are accessible to people with disabilities. This requires public institutes of higher learning such as Purdue to meet technical standards for all public-facing digital content. The new standards are designed to ensure that individuals with disabilities are not excluded from participating in, or denied the benefits of, the services, programs, and activities of public entities. Purdue must comply with these requirements by April 24, 2026.
In response to the mandate, several teams were created to evaluate Purdue’s digital environment, develop a plan to make this digital content accessible, and find ways to share this information with the Purdue community. These teams have engaged with campus partners to gather, use, and leverage resources and expertise across campus and systemwide.
While we recognize that many groups and individuals across campus and systemwide are engaging in efforts to create and remediate digital content to meet the upcoming Title II regulation deadline, there are three specific teams of individuals that we would like to honor today. In doing so, we are recognizing the work of these teams in providing institutional support to both tackle the daunting task of assuring that Purdue meets the standards set out in WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and to set up a more accessible future for our students, staff, faculty, and visitors. Having a small part in these meetings, OCR has witnessed firsthand the work they have put in behind the scenes, the panic questions that they are asked by faculty and staff, and the dedication they have to ensure that Purdue is ready to tackle the upcoming deadline and continue to provide support beyond the April 24th deadline.
Purdue IT
First, we would like to recognize the Purdue IT Team. This group is led by Jim Motta, represented today by Director of Enterprise Development Eric Biggs and Lead IT Project Manager Lowell Williams, and have been the key drivers of IT-related ADA initiatives. We would also like to extend our sincere thanks to major contributors Kristie Bishop, Tim Kite, Katie Brown, Eric Hassenplug, James Seidler, Bobby Dorn, and Drew Hallett, whose expertise and dedication have been instrumental to this work. The support provided by Purdue IT underpins the efforts and work of many individuals and groups dedicated to complying with these accessibility regulations.
We are proud to have Purdue IT as part of the Purdue Community and to honor their work with a 2026 Special Recognition Focus Award.
Purdue Brand Studio
Next, we would like to recognize the ADA Title II Compliance efforts provided by Purdue Brand Studio. Brad Beutler, Director of Digital Creative Services, has spearheaded a team of individuals, including but not limited to Teresa Walker, Emily Richwine, and Danielle Fawbush. This team, in collaboration with campus accessibility leaders, is coordinating a structured accessibility audit and remediation plan to guide campus marketing partners, has provided resources and support for websites, and has engaged in a series of group and individual meetings to provide digital accessibility support for members of the Purdue community.
We are proud to have Purdue Brand Studio as part of the Purdue Community and to honor their work with a 2026 Special Recognition Focus Award.
ADA Instructional Material System Project Team
Last, but certainly not least, we are recognizing the ADA Instructional Material System Project team, lead by and represented here today by Kevin O’Shea. Team members include, but are not limited to, Kristen Hamby, Amy Haston, Ben Holmes, Molly Kremer, Leslie Miller, Alex Mason, Jason Garvey, Casey Wright, Karen Neubaur, and Deb Steffen. There are many more members of these teams that have made significant contributions that are here today. Among their many efforts, this team has provided a series of synchronous workshops, daily drop-in help sessions, an asynchronous ADA Title II training course, engaged in a digital content remediation tool RFP, and had engaged in countless meetings and calls – all aimed at helping faculty members transition their course materials to align with the upcoming digital accessibility standards.
We are proud to have the ADA Instructional Material System Project Team as part of the Purdue Community and to honor their work with a 2026 Special Recognition Focus Award.
We are proud to have all of these teams as part of the Purdue Community and to honor their work with these 2026 Special Recognition Focus Awards.