Thomas “Tommy” Horejes, Ph.D. is an expert on disability policy, law, and sociology. Currently, he is the Director for Legal Compliance & Advocacy at Convo Relay. He has served as the Director of Policy & Advocacy for Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (TDI), as a national leader in policy advocacy, education, and innovation to foster full accessibility, equity, and inclusion in Information and Communications Technology. Prior to TDI, Horejes was Associate Provost for Gallaudet University and Executive Director of the Deaf Empowerment Awareness Foundation (DEAF, Inc.), a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering, raising awareness, and building a sustainable foundation of advocacy, communication and accessibility for the Deaf, Hard of Hearing, DeafBlind, and the Hearing communities. He was also an advocate for the Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness (GLAD), the largest deaf-run non-profit organization that provided legal advocacy and empowerment to deaf and hard of hearing consumers.
Dr. Horejes has published 15+ years of teaching disability policy, law, and sociology in higher education, 13+ peer-reviewed published articles on disability policy, law, including (Re)conceptualizing Disability Policy Frameworks for the Journal of Policy Practice, and presented 70+ scholarly works on legal policy, accessibility, education, and justice studies for industry conferences, including the International Sociological Association and the American Educational Research Association.