Mona Minkara

Mona Minkara, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Northeastern University, has been blind from childhood. In 2019, she created Planes, Trains, and Canes, a YouTube series that follows her solo journeys around the world, including trips to Manila, Johannesburg, and Tokyo.

Experiencing data through touch can be especially powerful, says Mona Minkara, a computational chemist and bioengineer at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, who began to lose her vision as a young child. Minkara collaborated on a 2022 study4 that described representing data as 3D-printed graphics called lithophanes.