'How pragmatic is it to be a blind scientist?’

‘The world is built for sighted people’ says Mona Minkara. Blind since childhood, Minkara has struggled to navigate her way through the sighted world, but her passion and determination have kept her going. Having completing her PhD in 2015, she is now a post-doctoral research fellow in computational chemistry at the University of Minnesota, US. The barriers for blind students and researchers shouldn’t be underestimated, but that doesn’t mean they are insurmountable. While Minkara had always favoured the immediacy of computational chemistry, she says other types of chemistry can also be made accessible to blind students and researchers.