Barbara Spiecker

As Outreach Director at the Deaf Center, Dr. Barbara Spiecker leads strategic planning efforts to grow the Center’s reach and impact, building the partnerships and infrastructure needed to expand its work over the long term.

By training, Barbara is a deaf marine ecologist. Before coming to the Deaf Center, she studied how coastal, marine, and estuarine ecosystems, from kelp forests to coral reefs to eelgrass beds, respond to environmental change. Her work paired large-scale field monitoring with quantitative and computational tools to track these systems across space and time.

Teaching has run alongside that research throughout her career, from marine ecology and data science courses at the university level to her work as a deaf scientist co-founding Atomic Hands, a deaf-led STEM nonprofit. Atomic Hands is built on the premise that STEM is hard not because students can’t grasp the concepts, but because most educational systems aren’t designed for diverse learners. Through free videos, storybooks, and workshops, and a growing network connecting deaf STEM professionals and students, it works to expand who gets to participate in STEM.