Tara Brown-Ogilvie - Deafblindness - University of Northern Colorado 

Tara Brown-Ogilvie has enjoyed over 7 years of working with youth and adults with deafblindness. She is currently employed as a certified orientation and mobility specialist (COMS) and deafblind consultant in Fort Collins, Colorado.

She has M.S.Ed. in Orientation and Mobility along with a B.S. in Sign Language Interpreting and is nearing the completion of her Ph.D. program at University of Northern Colorado in Special Education (UNCO). Her focus is in deafblindness with research interests in transition services, adaptive orientation and mobility strategies, assistive technology, personnel preparation, professional development, and communication access.

Tara has conducted qualitative research on improving graduate training and professional development for orientation and mobility specialists working with children and youth who are deafblind. She presented on this topic in the form of a poster at Deafblind International (2017) in Denmark and as an oral presentation at the International Mobility Conference (2017) in Ireland. She has also been published as a co-author in the Journal of Blindness Innovation and Research (JBIR) for a qualitative study on the experiences of students with visual impairments receiving disability support services in higher education.

She has acted as a co-teacher and teaching assistant for numerous orientation and mobility courses at University of Northern Colorado. Tara was also invited to design and teach an orientation and mobility course at Portland State University (PSU) and has been frequently asked to speak at university classes, professional in-services, and practioner-based conferences.

Tara has joined several task forces in deafblindness at the state and national level. She volunteers her time as a reviewer for the National Intervener Certification E-Portfolio (NICE) and briefly interned at the National Center on Deafblindness (NCDB) in Monmouth, Oregon. She has also taken on the role of ad-hoc reviewer for different academic journals in special education under the topics of visual impairment and deafblindness.

She was selected for the 2019 DVIDB Virginia M. Sowell Student of the Year Award which recognizes a student committed to the education and/or rehabilitation of individuals with visual impairments and deafblindness.

In her free time, Tara enjoys cooking, traveling, and hiking around Colorado.