Amie was born in Sierra Leone without any hearing impairment but at the age of 3, she became deaf as a result of a civil war in her country. Due to this, she struggled academically in elementary school, Amies’s father then decided to send her to a family friend in the US in hopes of finding a cure. But despite seeking medical treatment, all efforts to reverse her hearing were to no avail.

Left with no choice, AMIE embraced the deaf community and learned American sign language (ASL). Academic life in the US was also challenging for her as she could not understand what her teachers and classmates were saying.

Amie said she understood mathematics because of its visual nature, even though she couldn’t comprehend spoken instructions, she was able to follow the formulas and step-by-step processes of the subject. Her passion for more advanced math developed her interest in chemistry.

“Anytime a person talked, I didn’t understand anything, but when they would write out the formulas then I could see it and I could see each step of how to solve that problem, I was able to learn about and see chemical reactions–how the reactions occur–and then make predictions,’’ she said.

Amie earned an associate degree in laboratory sciences from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute of Technology before obtaining a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the same institution. After she graduated high school, she secured a job at Dow Chemicals, a laboratory where she participated in research. The doctoral research focused on the impact of hormones on plant-pathogen interactions and this sparked her desire for a Ph.D.