Roberto Cásarez, Ph.D. is AdelanteND's Vice President for 2024-2025 and the academic technology specialist of the Teaching and Learning Technologies (TLT) group in the Office of Information Technology. The University of Notre Dame awarded Roberto a 2024 Presidential Award for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The award recognizes a staff member who has exercised leadership or made significant contributions in advancing diversity, equity and inclusion at the University or in the greater Michiana community.
In addition to his work leading AdelanteND, Roberto is at the forefront of the University's efforts to ensure learning content is accessible to all students.
As noted on the award page, "Roberto is a passionate advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion in the OIT and the broader University. Roberto pursued his advanced degree in learning technologies because of the accessibility and inclusion gaps he himself experienced as a student. He wants to be part of the solution and serve as an advocate for students with diverse backgrounds, helping them thrive and feel at home at Notre Dame. Roberto has been a unifying force in the OIT’s implementation of Yuja Panorama digital accessibility software. This software helps faculty to make multimodal course content to serve students with diverse learning preferences. He inspired the TLT team to go beyond the minimum requirements in the learning management system and has formed an Accessibility Working Group with Panorama to ensure maximal deployment of this powerful tool. The TLT team helped modify the Moreau First Year course content using Panorama in order to achieve a 100 percent accessible rating. Panorama is now being deployed on University websites to give web viewers the ability to customize how they consume publicly available content."
Congratulations, Roberto!