Two appointed to RIT/NTID Foundation Board of Directors

Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf has appointed Amberlee Jones, of Rochester, New York, and Sam Sepah of Pleasanton, California, to their Foundation Board of Directors.

“Amberlee and Sam represent the best of NTID, and we are pleased to have them as part of the Foundation Board,” said Bryan Hensel, executive director of the NTID Office of External Affairs. “They have been contributing to the betterment of the college since their time as students, and we are fortunate to have their leadership.”

Amberlee Jones graduated from RIT/NTID in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in ASL-English interpretation. After working for a year with BOCES and in the community as a freelance interpreter, she joined the NTID’s Department of Access Services in 2014, where she worked on the Computer Science and Business Team.

She is a graduate of the 2019 African American Leadership Development Program, a regional initiative designed to strengthen leadership capacity, civic engagement, and professional advancement among African American professionals.

In July 2019, she stepped into a leadership role with the Randleman Program, a two-year preceptorship at RIT focused on recruiting and retaining emerging interpreters of color. In 2020, she co-founded the Randleman Summer Intensive, a national six-week professional development program for early-career interpreters from underrepresented backgrounds. The Randleman team received RIT’s Presidential Award for Outstanding Staff Excellence in 2022 for its work expanding interpreter education, increasing representation, and advancing diversity and access in the field. Jones also presented at the Conference of Interpreter Education and has formally mentored more than 10 interpreters entering the field.

In 2022, she transitioned to the Office of External Affairs at NTID as a development officer, building partnerships and advancing institutional priorities. In 2024, she became a founding member of the Rochester Advancement Professionals of Color group, helping to create spaces for growth and opportunity so that a more diverse generation can lead impactful initiatives and fund programs that ensure their voices are at the table.

In 2025, she joined the Rochester Area Community Foundation as a philanthropic engagement officer, where she leads the organization’s annual campaign. In this role, she also partners with donors and nonprofit organizations to strengthen philanthropic giving, support strategic grantmaking, and advance initiatives that address critical community needs across the region.

"This community has invested in me, and I have been made a better person for it. I would be remiss not to pay it forward and support the advancement of the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community,” Jones said.  

Sam Sepah is a global leader transforming the future of AI for more than one billion people with disabilities and deafness. His work spans the intersection of Google Research, the Deaf community, and the global accessibility tech industry. He specializes in taking complex AI innovations from the research laboratory and delivering them as real-world tools that enrich millions of lives.

As a senior lead AI Accessibility Research Program Manager at Google, Sepah was an early founding member of the Natively Adaptive Interfaces (NAI) initiative. This innovative AI agent advances the quality of user experience by allowing technology to learn and adapt to individual needs. He also is a co-founder of Sign Language Research at Google. He played a pivotal role in the strategic delivery of SignGemma, a breakthrough and Big Tech industry-first Sign Language AI model. Beyond technology, he shaped global policy as the chairperson of the AI Taskforce for the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) and the chairperson of Atomic Hands boards. He also serves on the boards of the NTID Foundation and the Ohlone College Foundation.

With a career span of more than two decades, Sepah’s expertise is unique. He broke major corporate barriers as the only Culturally Deaf Human Resources leader in the Fortune 500, advising giants like IBM, NIH, and DOL. Today, he uses that leadership to ensure technology is built - for everyone. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from RIT, continuing his mission to make technology an AI universal tool for advancing human potential.