Matthew J. Guberman-Pfeffer

When Matthew J. Guberman-Pfeffer started working toward his undergraduate degree in 2007, he planned to study political science, and he selected chemistry as an elective. Guberman-Pfeffer has low vision and is considered legally blind, so he met with the disability office and professors in the chemistry department to discuss the concerns they had about his accommodations. “The disability coordinator was mostly speechless over how up-front the faculty was in their view that there was no way I could learn chemistry,” he says.To the faculty’s push-back, he replied, “Just give me a chance.” After two semesters, he switched his major to chemistry. He gravitated toward physical chemistry because he loved delving into the field’s fundamental questions about how molecules work.Fast-forward to today, and Guberman-Pfeffer is a newly hired assistant professor in physical chemistry at New Mexico State University. He’s teaching graduate biochemistry this fall, and his research laboratory will focus in part on designing software to make computational chemistry accessible to all.While he is firm in his belief that anyone should pursue lab-based science if that’s where their passion lies, he noted that the lab courses he took didn’t provide visually impaired students with an independent and inclusive experience. During his undergraduate career, he observed a student assistant doing the manual manipulations required in laboratory courses. “This is the standard accommodation for the visually impaired in a lab science setting, but it is inadequate,” he says. “We are quite literally telling [those who are] visually impaired that you can only be