Dr. Mona Minkara • Vision is More than Sight
(Chemistry Postdoc, University of Minnesota || MN USA)
“I am a blind computational chemist. I have been blind since the age of seven, when I was diagnosed with macular degeneration and cone rod dystrophy and a doctor in Lebanon told my mother I wasn’t worth educating. But I’m naturally very stubborn. And I’ve always been curious about how the world works. I just want to know — How do things come together? What is the underlying pattern to the universe? Those are fundamental questions you can ask every day as a researcher. So that’s why I became a scientist. I get to face every day with the possibility of discovering something new, learning something new.
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As a graduate student I worked towards designing a novel inhibitor for the protein Helicobacter pylori urease using computational techniques. It was very difficult in the beginning to code the scripts I needed. I coded mostly from memory, having someone read the script back to me character by character. But because I had to analyze the data differently I picked up on patterns my sighted peers missed. Now as a postdoc, I’m studying surfactants using Monte Carlo simulations.
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Soon I will be one of the only blind chemistry professors in the world. Very little in the computational chemistry world is actually accessible to a blind person — I have a team of people who are my conduit to the sighted world. I would die very happy if I can make my job completely accessible to a blind person, no assistance from others. I want to see more people of diverse backgrounds and abilities enter science. I believe the future of discovery lies with bringing diverse thought into problem solving.
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There’s a famous quote by Helen Keller, where she says that you’re not really living life unless it’s a daring adventure. When I was a kid I was told to live within the parameters of my blindness, to approach life more strategically and safely. ‘Don’t shoot for the stars. You want to be practical.’ But the reality is, life is a lot better when you are shooting for the stars. It’s a lot more fulfilling, even if it’s more challenging.”
