OUR PEOPLE
Staff
Alex Truesdell
Executive Director and Founder
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Alex brings a long history of challenging assumptions, raising expectations, and discovering untapped potential in individuals, classrooms, and communities. Alex founded the Assistive Device Center at the Perkins School for the Blind in 1987 and the Adaptive Design Association in 2001. Alex is a MacArthur Fellow (2015) and envisions a day when adaptive design thinking and careers are abundant and considered indispensable worldwide.
​Jennifer Hercman
Managing Director
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Jennifer enjoys supporting programs where individuals and communities can develop their skills and discover their imaginative abilities. She's delighted to work with Adaptive Design Association where design, access, community, altruism, and education coalesce. She wants to ensure the world knows the mission of ADA, but also its integrity in pursuit of that mission, and the healing energy at ADA, where everyone gives as much as they get and where everyone belongs.
​Tamara Morgan
Community Partnerships Coordinator
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Tamara is an eternal optimist and a believer that people need people in order to create a better world. She joins the Adaptive Design community from a school of mental health well-being and with a fire for justice for all people and all abilities.
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Bet ya didn’t know….. Tamara believes she’s the 4th member of 90’s R&B group SWV, and the late great Rembrandt’s apprentice.
Michelle D'Mello
​Grant Writer
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Michelle enjoys capturing and communicating the innovative projects and achievements of ADA. She grew up in multiple cities in India, making friends, learning new languages, and eating new foods. She learned to celebrate diversity, value education, respect differences, and encourage innovation. She enjoys creative, passionate people and being part of a team working toward a time where people of all abilities and backgrounds are valued. When not at ADA, she's likely buying houseplants to replace the ones she over-watered into an early grave.
Antoinette LaSorsa
Fabrication Director
Antoinette builds for literacy, overseeing the creation of tangible symbol cues. For two decades, she has designed and constructed countless adaptations to support the physical and social development of children in the classroom, in the cafeteria, on the playground, and all around town.
Adam El-Sawaf
​Adaptive Designer & Fabricator
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Adam is a designer who loves creating adaptations of all kinds but enjoys teaching others about the process even more. He believes that everyone has the potential to design in a meaningful and impactful way and is passionate about empowering designers and newcomers alike to do so.
​Susan Fridie
Occupational Therapy Consultant
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Susan is an OT who's a lifelong maker: sewing, pottery, needlework, baking, and now, cardboard carpentry. She loves simple, elegant solutions to real-life problems and how a single change can sometimes re-make a person's life trajectory. She's jazzed to be able to combine the making and the problem solving with another major interest: teaching, which she gets to do often at ADA.
​Tanya Couturier
Fabrication Assistant
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Tanya promotes the social development of children through building communication cues and other adaptive devices. She is proud to have her work contribute to the lives of others. She celebrates the human-centered culture and practice of Adaptive Design.
​Charles Cohen
Fabrication Assistant
One of Charles’s many many jobs at Adaptive Design--other than making people laugh, because he is also a comedian--is that he is in charge of one of piece of equipment: the rocking perch. The rocking perch is a type of rocking chair that Charles fabricates and innovates on, as well as on a static design.
