ADAPTED FROM ISTOCK.COM/GREYJA few years ago, the University of Delaware’s Karl Booksh realized he was the only tenured chemist that he knew of at a top-tier research university who had gone through all of his scientific training, from college onward, with a disability—in his case, paraplegia in his legs and limited use of his hands and arms. This made him wonder: Where were all the scientists with disabilities?
A statistics-oriented person, Booksh scoured data going back to the mid-1980s on the numbers of PhD-level scientists in the U.S. who were living with disabilities. According to one report from the National Science Foundation (NSF), in 2013 about one in nine scientists and engineers under the age of 75 identified as having a disability, not far from the national rate of about 12 percent. But for more than half of those scientists, the onset of disability occurred after the age of 40, once their careers had already started rolling. The number of students who have disabilities when they enter science, Booksh says, has been lagging for decades. He realized that if he wanted something done about the bottleneck for would-be scientists with disabilities, he was ...
