Commencement day for Amie Fornah Sankoh was greater than the completion of a level. She turned the primary deaf Black lady to finish her doctorate research in a science, expertise, engineering, and math program in the US.
In keeping with Chemistry World, Sankoh was awarded her Ph.D. after graduating from the College of Tennessee (UT) Knoxville’s biochemistry and mobile and molecular biology program.
A local of West Africa, Sankoh was despatched to the U.S. to stay along with her father’s greatest good friend at 12 years previous after shedding her listening to in the course of the civil warfare. She struggled along with her research as a younger deaf scholar; American medical doctors couldn’t remedy her deafness. Sankoh stated she took a couple of years to study American Signal Language.
Arithmetic was pleasurable for Sankoh as she discovered it to be extra of a visible topic. “Anytime an individual talked, I didn’t perceive something, however after they would write out the formulation then I might see it and I might see every step of methods to remedy that drawback,” she stated.
In highschool, she fell in love with extra complicated arithmetic. That led her into chemistry, which excited her. “I used to be in a position to study and see chemical reactions–how the reactions happen–after which make predictions,’” she stated.
Sankoh labored as a lab technician for Dow Chemical after highschool. She obtained each her affiliate’s diploma in laboratory sciences and a bachelor’s diploma in biochemistry from Rochester Institute of Expertise’s Nationwide Technical Institute for the Deaf. She discovered one other laboratory place after faculty.
“I used to be taking part in analysis and having fun with it, and studying and experiencing the great thing about it, after which began to find my very own potential,” Fornah defined. “And that led me to go forward and enter the Ph.D. program at UT Knoxville.”
Sankoh was the featured speaker for UT’s Spring 2023 Graduate Hooding Ceremony. Her Ph.D. analysis centered on the consequences of hormones on plant-pathogen interactions.
