Mona Minkara

In her fourth year of graduate school at the University of Florida, Mona Minkara was ready for a new challenge. Mike Weaver, one of her mentors, encouraged her to try teaching, even though she was attending on a fellowship that relieved her of such duties. Others in the chemistry department were skeptical. How was she going to teach? The department had never had a blind teaching assistant before. “I told them, ‘Give me anything. Let me try,’ ” Minkara says. She wasn’t given much: a general chemistry recitation that wasn’t required and that, historically, most students stopped showing up to after the first day of class. Still, “I poured my heart and soul into it,” she says. During her first class, 14 students sat in attendance. By the end of the semester, that number had jumped to 50. The students wanted more. So the department approached Minkara with the suggestion that she continue to teach as a volunteer. She declined. By then, she had learned what she needed: the experience had “ignited the possibility in my mind that I could be a professor,” Minkara says. Six years later, Minkara opened her own research laboratory at Northeastern University with a focus on computationally modeling hard-to-study immunoproteins found on the surface of lungs. Minkara, who was diagnosed with macular generation and cone-rod dystrophy at the age of 7, has redefined what is possible for blind scientists. Minkara’s curiosity for science began to grow when she was a child, and her interest never