When she was 6 or 7, Mona Minkara’s eyesight began to fade.
Eventually diagnosed with macular degeneration and cone rod dystrophy, the post-doctoral research fellow in the University of Minnesota’s chemistry department is now working to create a STEM curriculum for blind children in developing countries.
She is creating the curriculum with her assistants, who aide her in computational chemistry research. She studies surfactants – molecules with one end that is attracted to water and one end that is not.
Minkara wants the curriculum to be blind-accessible and low-cost. It will first be implemented in a camp in Lebanon that has programs for both blind and sighted children. The camp helps train blind children in life skills and integrates them with sighted children through sports and art. Minkara’s sister joined the camp in 2009.
Most blind-accessible curricula is expensive and her team wanted to create a way to translate visual science experiments into something blind children can understand.
The team of four is now raising money to travel to Lebanon in July so they can teach the curriculum to camp volunteers.
One main goal of theirs is to add touch and smell more into experiments, while making them safe. Being able to feel the heat from a homemade volcano and touching the foam would make it more accessible to blind children.
Minkara was born in Maryland to immigrants from Lebanon. Though her parents wanted to return to Lebanon, they stayed in the United States with the hope of a better education for Minkara, whose sight was quickly disappearing.
Minkara became interested in chemistry in her elementary and high school years because she was interested in how the world works.
"Even though I'm blind, I'm a very visual learner," she said. "Yeah, ironic, I know."
Committed teachers and a strong interest in science pushed Minkara to construct models of molecules with her hands and trace diagrams in order to learn concepts, she said.
Minkara graduated from Wellesley College in 2009 with a dual degree in chemistry and Middle Eastern studies, received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida and took a research position at the University a year and a half ago.
Minkara is legally blind, with 2 percent vision in her left eye and some light perception in her right eye.
Minkara and her team plan on helping a lot of children with this curriculum, and it looks like they will.