Between Two Languages

When I first started translating between Russian-speaking patients and their doctors, I thought the job was simple: move words from one language to another. It didn't take long to realize it was something more.

A diagnosis is frightening in any language. But when you can't understand the person explaining it to you — when you're nodding along to words you don't recognize, in a place built around a language that isn't yours — fear turns into something heavier. It becomes distrust, distance, sometimes silence. I saw how a few sentences in someone's own language could change the entire temperature of a room: shoulders lowering, questions finally being asked, a patient going from a case to a person.

That thread runs through almost everything I care about.

In the lab, I've studied how long-term air pollution shaped COVID-19 outcomes, and I've spent months tracing immune genes across species to understand what evolutionary conservation can teach us about human health. Research taught me to be precise, patient, and comfortable not knowing the answer yet. But it also reminded me that behind every dataset is a population of real people — and behind every "outcome" is someone's grandmother, someone's child.

On hospital floors as a health scholar, in a dermatology clinic and a pediatric dental office, and at the summer camp where I looked after kids for three years, I kept noticing the same thing: the science only works if the person in front of you feels seen.

That belief is also why I helped start Autism Without a Voice. Our goal was never just to get people with disabilities into the room. It was to make sure that once they were there, they were genuinely included — supported, listened to, given the chance to build confidence and connection. Presence isn't the same as belonging. Access isn't the same as care.

I'm still a high school student. I don't have most of the answers, and I have a long way to go before I earn the title of "doctor." But I've started to understand what kind of doctor I want to become: one who treats scientific rigor and human empathy as the same job, not competing ones.

This blog is where I'll think out loud about all of it — the research I'm working on, what I'm learning in clinics and labs, the questions disability advocacy keeps raising for me, and the occasional detour into whatever else has my attention. Some posts will be about science. Some will be about people. Most, I suspect, will be about both.

Thanks for reading. I'm glad you're here.