Grace Kago '06: Breaking Language Barriers in Science
Grace Kago '06 is a recent Ph.D. graduate and current postdoctoral fellow at UT Austin. She was recently interviewed about one of her projects: breaking down language barriers when it comes to sharing public health information.
From Grace:
This project started in 2020 during the pandemic where I became hyper-aware of the gap between English speakers and non-English speakers, especially because most scientific developments and findings are communicated in English.
In particular, the gap between myself as a graduate student in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at UT and my grandparents, who live outside the capital city of Kenya was acutely apparent to me. So, I challenged myself to start making short informational videos about SARS-CoV-2 and the vaccines in my mother tongue of Gikuyu/Kikuyu so they could see and listen. Since then I have made a few others with English subtitles, and continue to learn with each video. I hope to encourage other scientists who are multilingual to consider translation of their work into their mother tongues so we can collectively diversify scientific lexicon across languages. I imagine that this will be one way to encourage science literacy across the globe, especially as we continue to learn more about our world and equip ourselves to engage with issues like climate change, future pandemics, and science mis/dis-information.
