The tools we build become the questions we ask

It’s a hot summer morning. I’m walking to work, tapping my cane, tracing a path through the streets of Boston. I reflect on how I got here. The sidewalk shifts beneath my feet—a faint change in texture, a shadow I register not by sight but by the way the air flows and the sunlight falls on my face this time of year. That’s my cue to turn right. Cool air wraps around me as I step into the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex at Northeastern University, the floor smoothing beneath each step. I listen for the elevator and follow the sounds that guide me forward.As I enter my office, the robotic voice of my screen reader announces a message from one of my graduate students. Some of these students will go on to lead their own laboratories—asking new questions, reimagining the tools they’ve inherited.Today, I am a professor of bioengineering and principal investigator of the Minkara Computational Modeling for Biointerface Engineering (COMBINE) Laboratory. We model pulmonary surfactant (PS) at the molecular level using various computational chemistry techniques. But for much of my life, I wasn’t sure I belonged in science. Doctors told my mother not to waste a penny on my education because I was going to be blind. There were no blind scientists in the textbooks handed to me. Later, advisers tried to keep me out of advanced classes, taking away my right to try out of fear that I might fail.Even as a researcher, I questioned whether chemistry