Seth Bravin, '96, appointed to the Board of Trustees

Gallaudet University announced on July 29, 2015, the appointment of Seth Bravin, ’96, to its Board of Trustees. Bravin’s tenure will begin at the October 2015 Board of Trustees meeting.

Seth Bravin has nearly 20 years of experience in the business sector and a background in accessibility, finance, and higher education. Bravin is currently the associate director of technology access at George Washington University (GWU) where he works in close collaboration with stakeholders throughout the campus to incorporate universal design principles and to advance GWU’s commitment to accessibility.

In this role, Bravin led the development of a strategic plan to implement accessibility initiatives and works closely with GWU stakeholders to develop institutional priorities. He also serves as a consultant to the GWU campus community guiding universal design principles for web content and course materials. He is also a member of the University’s Accessibility Oversight Committee. Before joining GWU, Bravin worked at IBM for more than a decade, where he was a strategy manager with IBM Accessibility and did financial planning for IBM Global Public Sector.

Bravin holds an MBA from Cornell University and a bachelor’s degree in business administration and finance from Gallaudet University. Before attending business school, he worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a management and technology consulting firm and Dow, Lohnes & Albertson, a corporate law firm.

In 2014, Bravin participated in IBM’s Corporate Service Corps program and spent a month in Indonesia where he worked with a disability non-governmental organization on several accessibility initiatives. In 2011, Bravin testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions about how higher education can help improve employment outcomes for people with disabilities.

Bravin serves on the Lexington School for the Deaf Board of Trustees in New York and on an advisory board for a National Science Foundation grant at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Previously, he served on the boards of Maryland Association of the Deaf, and the Hearing and Speech Agency, a non-profit services agency located in Baltimore.

He has also taught at the Gallaudet University Leadership Institute and hosted several technology camps sponsored by IBM for high school students with disabilities. He has presented on accessibility topics at several disability conferences, and most recently, at the United States Business Leadership Network conference. Also, Bravin received the 2009 Employee of the Year award from Careers & the disABLED magazine.

Bravin lives in Urbana, Md., with his wife Neshy, ’98 & ’00, and their three children. He is the son of Philip W. Bravin, ’66 & ’14, who became the first deaf Board of Trustees chair in Gallaudet’s history following the Deaf President Now movement in 1988. His mother is Judy Bravin, ’66.