Amie Fornah Sankoh makes coatings from plants

Chemical coatings are everywhere. Touch a painted wall, a disposable coffee cup, or a sheet of printer paper, and there’s almost certainly a coating there: it prevented the paint from leaving a snail trail; it kept the cup from soaking up hot liquid; and it helped the glossy paper glide through the printer without smudging the ink.

Amie Fornah Sankoh, a senior research specialist in research and development (R&D) for Dow, focuses on improving these products. She and her bosses at Dow were reluctant to get into details for proprietary reasons, but Pu Luo, associate R&D director for the coating materials division at Dow, says Fornah Sankoh’s research aims “to try to identify suitable plant-based raw materials to make polymers that could deliver the same performance as fossil-based materials.”

Fornah Sankoh joined Dow as a full-time employee in 2024 and has quickly seen success at the company. “What sets Amie apart from her peers is not only her technical acumen but her ability to drive meaningful change,” Luo says. “Her research extends beyond laboratories; it creates opportunities for inclusivity and empowerment within STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics].”

Fornah Sankoh was born in Sierra Leone at the time of the country’s civil war. She lost her hearing at age 3 after a high fever brought on by malaria. In 2003, when she was 12 years old, Fornah Sankoh’s parents sent her to live in the US with a family friend, who adopted her. Her parents hoped that a more advanced medical system could restore her hearing, but the hearing loss was permanent.

The move did give Fornah Sankoh access to better educational opportunities, she says. At age 15, she learned American Sign Language (ASL). Growing up Deaf, she says she struggled in every subject except math. “I could see the teacher solving the problems up at the front of the class. I didn’t have to depend on my hearing.” As a high school student, she enjoyed chemistry’s quantitative aspects and hands-on experiments.

After graduating from high school, Fornah Sankoh attended the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) to pursue an associate’s degree in laboratory science technology. During this time, she did two internships at Dow, which gave her hands-on experience in the chemical industry and inspired her to continue her education.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry at RIT and went on to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center (where her mentor Tessa Burch-Smith moved during Fornah Sankoh’s studies). Her research focused on how plants use salicylic acid to regulate cell-to-cell trafficking by allowing or inhibiting other cellular molecules.

Although she is the first Black, Deaf woman in the US to earn a PhD in a STEM field, Fornah Sankoh says, “I want to get the science industry to see me beyond my disability. My disability doesn’t define me.”

Even so, communicating her science can be challenging. ASL doesn’t have signs for most of the technical terminology that she uses. When C&EN interviewed Fornah Sankoh with ASL interpreters, they had to either establish signs for technical terms or use the ASL alphabet to spell them out. That can be tedious and time consuming, and not every interpreter understands her science or communicates it accurately, Fornah Sankoh says.

For work, she relies on written communication like email and messaging apps to stay connected with her team. For meetings and presentations, she uses ASL interpreters. She also uses speech-to-text captioning but points out that artificial intelligence–generated captions are not great and that AI often struggles with technical terms. Fornah Sankoh puts a lot of effort into making sure her colleagues understand her ideas. “I want hearing scientists to make as much of an effort as I am,” she says.

Fornah Sankoh also can’t hear alarms that indicate an emergency occurring or a need to evacuate a lab. Because safety is a priority at Dow, Fornah Sankoh collaborated with the company’s environmental health and safety team and emergency services and security team to create a text-based alert system that goes to her mobile phone and smartwatch, giving her real-time emergency information.

Fornah Sankoh says she’s working to break barriers not just for herself but for those who follow in her footsteps. To her, being a trailblazer “means navigating and excelling in spaces that were not originally designed with people like me in mind and using every opportunity to challenge norms and expand what’s possible.”