Whirlwind Staff
Ralf Hotchkiss
Wheelchair-rider; engineer, inventor; Whirlwind co-founder; currently Whirlwind Chief Engineer and principal instructor in Whirlwind wheelchair design class; Women Pushing Forward (formerly Whirlwind Women) Advisory Board member; for 35+ years a wheelchair-designer - builder - trainer; 1989 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and recipient of countless other honors and awards; has worked in 42 countries teaching people who need wheelchairs how to build and maintain them for themselves.
Bob Incerti
Bob Incerti, SF Operations Manager and Instructor in wheelchair design and fabrication. Graduate of SFSU Design and Industry Department. Vietnam Veteran. Professional wood worker and master craftsman with a career in residential construction. Lived and taught outdoor education in Kenya and Lesotho. Has volunteered in outdoor education in the SF Bay Area for 25 years. Has worked with Whirlwind in both a volunteer and employee capacity since 1998.
Marc Krizack
Social Entrepreneur, organizational development specialist, lawyer and activist for disability rights. Whirlwind Executive Director since 2003. Conceived and led development of Whirlwind's Franchise Network. A former wheelchair mechanic at the UC Berkeley Disabled Students Program in late 70's and early 80's, throughout the 90's he helped transform a disabled sports club in Novosibirsk (Siberia) into Russia's first independent living center and helped establish the first university level disabled students program in Russia. He is a contributing author and member of the editorial committee of the recently published World Health Organization Guidelines on the Provision of Manual Wheelchairs in Less Resourced Settings.
Keoke King
Keoke studied Whirlwind as part of his MBA work in social entrepreneurship at SFSU. Afterwards, he joined the team as Marketing Director in the summer of 2009. He has a background in non-profit fundraising and hopes to be a career do-gooder. He's been a sucker for strategy games since playing Risk endlessly as a kid. Now, he likes to bring business principles to organizations which are committed to building social value through sustainable and scalable strategies.
Matt McCambridge
Matt returns to Whirlwind as a permanent team member, following years of volunteer work dating back to his graduation from Stanford's Product Design program in 1998. In the intervening years Matt has worked on the stair-climbing, self-balancing IBOT power wheelchair created by inventor Dean Kamen (best known for the Segway scooter), and spent almost three years in the Philippines establishing a new wheelchair factory and service network for French NGO Handicap International. Matt brings engineering skills and a focus on design process, as well as first-hand experience with the challenges of creating a robust local service provision network.
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Joan Rogin
Long time volunteer with Whirlwind and Women Pushing Forward (originally Whirlwind Women). Writer, editor of Whirlwind publications, Keeper of the Mailing list. Retired from University of California administration.
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Aaron Wieler
Aaron Wieler joined the Whirlwind design team in 2008. After an introduction to industrial design for mobility technology through the Lemelson Assistive Technology Development Center at Hampshire College, he joined Whirlwind for a summer internship in 2006, working on the design of alternative wheelchair propulsion technology. Since then, he taught a course at Hampshire on the design and implementation of "Appropriate Technology" and spent a year in Namibia, working on the design, fabrication, and establishment of small-scale production of bicycle-pulled ambulances for use by rural health care workers in Namibia. Aaron specializes in design processes informed by iterative design and rapid prototyping but is rapidly learning and incorporating CAD in his work.
Tapan Banerjee
Tapan Banerjee, PhD, serves as a Senior Adviser to Whirlwind. He is the Senior Vice President for Global Partners United, and served as the former Executive Director of the U.S. International Council on Disabilities (USICD). He has over 25 years of experience in the field of international business development, with a special focus on creating opportunities for people with disabilities in corporate and public ventures.
Presently, he is Counselor, Senior Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE); Consultant, National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), U.S. Department of Education; local chair corps for Wheels of the World; Board of Directors, Excel, an employment opportunity program for disabled persons; Program Manager, MGM consulting company dealing with training and creating opportunities for persons with disabilities; Representative from Darnesville District to Fairfax Area Disability Board and member of Long Term Care Coordinating Committee of Fairfax County, VA. He is an advisor for E-Car Corporation, for golf carts for disabled golfers; member, Board of Directors, National Spinal Cord Injury Association (NSCIA), USA; and Consultant, World Bank's Disability Program, Washington, D.C.
He was the Regional Commercial Counselor for West Africa for the American Embassy in Ivory Coast, Director of the U.S. Commercial Liaison Office to the African Development Bank (ADB), U.S. Department of Commerce, Commercial Counselor, American Embassies in Abu Dhabi, UAE and Amsterdam; Director, U.S. Export Assistance Center in Atlanta; First Secretary/Commercial Attach, American Embassy, New Delhi, India, and First Secretary/Senior Commercial Officer for the American Embassy in Helsinki, Finland.