Stern, Mark

Born at Washington, DC and deaf from spinal meningitis at age 1. Attended oral deaf education programs, then graduated Stanford University and earned a master's in computer science from Brown University. Worked as manger of Web site navigation architecture at Netscape in the San Francisco Bay area. Earned a private pilot's license and in 1999 made a 7-week trip across the U.S., landing in every one of the contiguous 48 states and documenting his flight on a Web site.