Carmel Heydarian, Research Fellow

Carmel Heydarian (MS) is a Research Fellow with the American Foundation for the blind. She joined AFB as a volunteer in September 2024, before becoming a Research Fellow in November of that same year. She works with her fellow researchers on writing reports and manuscripts, presenting at conferences and webinars, running analyses in R, and promoting AFB’s research work impacting the blindness space.

She is a co-author on several articles in the disability space. Thanks to the research team, she published her first first-author article in The Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness titled “Way to go: Obstacles and Solutions to Indoor Wayfinding for People who are Blind or Have low Vision.” Carmel has also presented at Closing the Gap and ATIA, in addition to giving guest lectures and speaking on panels.

Carmel graduated from The University of Texas at El Paso with her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. Carmel then pursued a Master's in Graphic Information Technology at Arizona State University. Her capstone project was a research report titled “The Curb-Cut Effect and its Interplay with Video Games.”

Carmel worked as a research assistant at a university lab, where she got her first taste of disability research focused on blind and low vision participants. She later worked as a User Experience Designer, designing prototypes for complex financial calculators. Carmel later did several contract roles as a researcher conducting needs assessments and using her programming skills to clean and organize data. She continues to do contract work, while a Research Fellow at AFB, on other projects in the disability research space.

Carmel is also a contributor in two working groups writing manuscripts that fill the gaps in disability research. Her research interests are disability and transportation; and disability and community engagement.

Expertise: Research

Please email communications@afb.org to request an interview with Carmel Heydarian.