Mona Minkara uncovers patterns in how our lungs interact with airborne viruses

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 degeneration 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 strayed, even as she became fully blind and people in her life kept telling her how impractical her dreams of becoming a scientist were. “You couldn’t stop me from pursuing science,” she says. “It was just part of who I am.”

Still, imposter syndrome and internalized ableism plagued Minkara throughout the early years of her academic career. As an undergraduate student at Wellesley College, Minkara gravitated toward quantum chemistry, fascinated by the interactions of molecules on the atomic level. But as the first blind science student in the college’s history, she was constantly struggling to ensure she had the resources she needed. So when she was choosing a PhD program, access to accommodations mattered just as much as the research. “I knew I couldn’t fight for accommodations and get a PhD at the same time,” she says.

Minkara chose to attend the University of Florida after the head of its disability office sat her down and told her they’d provide her with whatever she needed to succeed. She joined Kenneth Merz’s lab, where she modeled enzymes produced by infectious gastrointestinal bacteria. But even with support from UF’s disability office, she questioned whether she was going to make it through her PhD program. On the first day of classes, she got lost trying to find the chemistry building. She remembers thinking, “If I can’t even make it to the building, how am I ever going to write a thesis?”

Her confidence finally started to grow when she was a postdoctoral fellow in J. Ilja Siepmann’s lab at the University of Minnesota. Siepmann believed that because Minkara was blind, she’d be able to think about problems differently and solve problems no one else could. Before that, “I never thought of my blindness as an asset,” Minkara says.

In Siepmann’s lab, Minkara used Monte Carlo simulations to study how surfactants in personal care products like shampoo behave in different environments. She relied on computer programs she wrote to probe the properties of a large number of confirmations. She “analyzed and searched for different features than what people who rely on sight do,” Siepmann says. “To some extent, she was ahead of what I would call the machine learning revolution that relies on algorithms to find patterns in large collections of images.”

Inspired by her time in Siepmann’s lab modeling molecules at a liquid-air interface, Minkara now studies how proteins found in our lungs, known as pulmonary surfactants, behave. These proteins “regulate the surface tension in the lungs, allowing us to breathe,” Minkara says, and are a first line of defense against airborne pathogens that cause diseases like pneumonia and COVID-19. If a person lacks the right amount of surfactants, they’re more susceptible to certain diseases.

Her lab group at Northeastern uses molecular docking, Monte Carlo, and molecular dynamics simulations to decode how different surfactant proteins interact with pathogens. Recently, her group identified how certain mutations in surfactant protein D enhanced its binding to influenza A virus, which has implications on human health.

Last year, Minkara was awarded a US National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant and a Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the US National Institutes of Health to continue her surfactant protein research. “That was a really pivotal moment for me,” Minkara says. “My peers found my ideas worthy of being funded.” She recently achieved another goal: she submitted her application for tenure.

Minkara also shares the lessons she learned while navigating her career as a blind scientist. For much of her career, she’s had to figure out everything as she goes—how to teach a class, write a thesis, run a lab, apply for grants. “I want to make it easier for the next person,” she says. “I want there to be a next person.”

Minkara has published how-tos on how she made it through her doctoral program and taught her first class at Northeastern University. And since her time as a PhD student, she’s kept up a web page of advice and lists of software and hardware tools for blind scientists.

But for there to be more blind scientists, younger blind students need more opportunities to engage with science. For Minkara and her collaborator Bryan Shaw, a bio-inorganic chemistry professor at Baylor University, that means figuring out how to make science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education more accessible. In 2022, the two, along with a larger team, developed 3D-printed tactile graphics that allow blind people to analyze scientific data like mass spectra and gel electropherograms.

Through a partnership with the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Minkara and Shaw have brought their tactile graphics, along with other accessible technology, straight to high schoolers. Minkara is “the embodiment of what we’re trying to teach these kids,” Shaw says. “That if you want to be a scientist and you’re willing to put in the time, you can be one.” Now that the team has made data more accessible to blind students, Shaw says the focus has turned toward doing the same with wet chemistry labs. “We’re doing it one tool at a time,” he says.

To ensure that these resources get into the hands of people who need them, Minkara emphasizes that building community between blind students and successful STEM professionals is key. She shared this sentiment in a speech at the United Nations during the 8th International Day of Women and Girls in Science Assembly in 2023. The UN event featured Minkara and other members of Science in Braille, a global campaign that advocates for blind leadership and representation in STEM.

In her research lab, she welcomes students from diverse backgrounds and encourages them to think differently about scientific problems. “I’m aiming to raise the next generation of scientists,” Minkara says. She spends each day surrounded by students and access assistants in a collaborative research environment she’s cultivated. She knows that to become a scientist, no one can do it alone.