What is ASL at Cornell?

We aim to promote heightened awareness of the Deaf community, culture, and history. In doing so, we hope to facilitate an inclusive environment on campus and in the Ithaca community that welcomes Deaf and hard of hearing individuals, while allowing all students to develop a greater understanding of American Sign Language (ASL) and the Deaf community. Finally, we hope to achieve our vision and goals through collaboration with the Deaf community, weekly general body meetings, and events to encourage students in the ASL course sequence to apply their knowledge from class to the community.

Our Team

Alanna Yang

External Outreach

Katie Specht

Internal Outreach

Yoyo Zhang

Publicity Chair

Michael Vento

Education

Lisa Sunde

Advisor

Brandon Sheflin

President

Kayla Williams

Vice-President

Marisa Aratingi

Treasurer

Brenda Schertz

Advisor

Our History

Founded in January 2012, the original Cornell University Deaf Awareness Project (CUDAP) was established with a CPFB grant as a response to an urgent medical situation within the Ithaca local Deaf community. A certified American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter was not immediately available at the time, but our program founder was able to help interpret among medical personnel, police, and the Deaf patient. For the next seven years, CUDAP had been dedicating their efforts towards bringing ASL classes to the Cornell Campus. This was achieved in 2019 with the united help from many departments, including the Student Assembly and the Linguistics department. Since then, CUDAP has been working to support the ASL course sequence offered by Cornell University as well as promoting awareness of the Deaf community for an inclusive and accessible environment on campus. We have since updated our name to simply ASL at Cornell.