My name is Alicia Wooten, and I am a fifth-year PhD student here at Boston University.
So there isn’t one specific moment where I fell in love with science.
It was just a gradual development that happened.
I remember wanting to use my hands to do things.
I couldn’t just sit still.
If something was broken, I wanted to fix it.
If I didn’t understand something, I always asked, ‘How? Why?’
So, Cyclic di-AMP, or CDA, is a bacterial second messenger that plays an important role in homeostasis.
So it plays a role in potassium transport, in virulence, in the size.
Lots of different things.
When I was three, I was diagnosed as hard of hearing.
And I’ve had progressive hearing loss since then.
At that point, my parents made the decision to continue what they had been doing,
where I didn’t learn ASL, but I continued to speak with the help of speech therapy.
I sat at the front of the class, and tried to lip-read.
I had friends sitting nearby, whose notes I would look at to copy, or make sure I didn’t
miss anything.
Did I catch everything?
Definitely not.
Somehow, I got through life lipreading.
But I always felt like something was missing.
I started to pick up sign language through a deaf dance company that I attended during
the summer for three weeks.
I met many deaf people my age who immediately accepted me, who were very patient with me,
and helped me learn ASL.
They made sure I didn’t miss anything, and would take the time to chat with me.
That was really the first time in my life that I had 100% access, and after that, I
fell in love with ASL.
Obviously, every deaf person in science is different, but a lot of what we face is the
same for everyone.
People assume that we’re dumb, that we don’t know how to communicate, or that we can’t
work independently.
Or that we can’t drive.
Oh my gosh!
We have the challenge of proving ourselves to employers.
We have to show that on top of being deaf, we are just as capable of doing anything that
people without a disability can do.
I included the memory markers in this particular panel and was interested to note that the
IGD single positive population…
I think that deaf people do see an increased barrier with being in the science field.
One big challenge, I think, is finding interpreters.
How many American Sign Language interpreters actually have a science background?
Or an understanding of the terminology?
Not many are out there.
So being able to learn and understand what my peers are saying can be limited.
A lot of how you learn in the lab is through overhearing conversation, and then contributing
to that conversation.
And as a deaf person, that can be limiting.
In general, the deaf community can talk about all of the negatives we face, but honestly
my experience in this PhD program has been amazing.
I have a great group of friends who accept me for who I am.
I have people in this lab who take the time to chat with me and are patient with me.
I have a PI who knows a tiny bit of sign.
The nice thing about science is that everyone cares about what they do.
Everyone is creative and willing to work with others.
So all of the positives totally outweigh the negatives.