The Hammill Institute on Disabilities was organized in 2005 exclusively for charitable, scientific, and educational purposes to enhance the well-being of people with disabilities, their parents, and the professionals who are devoted to their interests. Our website provides information about the Institute’s mission and activities.
One of the Institute’s undertakings is the Hammill Institute Preservation Project (HIPP). An important part of this project is to identify (a) those individuals who made significant contributions to the fields of disability between the years 1800 and 1999 and (b) the top issues that have most influenced the various disability fields.
We initiated the project by creating a pools of prominent individuals in each of the disability fields consisting of journal editors and associate editors, university training faculty, officers and board members of parent and professional organizations, and professionals providing direct service. We then selected individuals from these pools to receive a questionnaire we created.
Once the responses were received and analyzed, short biographies for those people who received the most nominations were prepared. More comprehensive biographies were prepared for the most important individuals. We also commissioned papers or monographs dealing with the issues that respondees identified as the most important.