Koplitz spoke to deaf undergraduates at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she'd gone to college. Several, in a program that is now canceled, talked about plans to go to medical school.

She made a mid-career change, giving up her federal government job in public health to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. She has one year left to finish.

Another program, canceled by the Trump administration, paid for graduate school scholarships to fill the shortage of teachers of the deaf ... at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

In the laboratory, Sara Blick-Nitko searches for treatments for cancer. But before she could become a scientist, she had to find what deaf people like her call the "Deaf Scientist Pipeline.