I Might Just Have to Break Your Heart Of It All

Ask a professor in Biomedical field how hard it is to get one research project funded by NIH R01. Dr. Piero Anversa has led 110 of them. Dr. Anversa, a huge figure in cardiac stem cell research, found his pathway to over millions funding by the discovery of c-kit cells-adult stem cells that can regenerate...

Artivism Continues.

In my last blog, I wrote about Fujii, a far-right Japanese nationalist who made into headlines for kicking a Statue of Peace - a statue memorializing Japanese military “comfort women” - that was recently enacted in Taiwan. Several days after the kicking incident, Nikkei Asian Review, a moderately conservative Japanese newspaper released a report that...

Keep ‘Em Alive: Indigenous Languages

Intiq (Sun). Yacu (Water). Alili (Violet). Atsá (Eagle). Chimo (Greetings). Yabber (Talk).  Can you guess what all of these words have in common? All of these words are from indigenous languages: Quechua (Peru), Kichwa (Ecuador), Tagalog (Philippines). Dińe (Southwestern United States), Eskimo-Aleut (Greenland, Canada, Alaska), and Aboriginal (Australia), respectively. All of these indigenous languages and many...

Immigrant Alert

Children are often the ones who are affected greatly by the policies aiming to punish their parents. In the case of immigrants crossing into the U.S illegally, they even face the risk of being separated from their parents due to the “zero-tolerance” immigration policy. Migrant families with undocumented status in the U.S. now have a...

Resisting for peace or peace as resistance? Two Filipina women changing the world

In a recent report, the Silsilah Dialogue Movement, a peace movement founded in 1984 by an Italian, Fr. Sebastiano D’Ambra, has been credited for “transforming” Sta. Cruz, a Muslim village on the Sta. Cruz Island in the Philippines. Fr. Sebastiano’s life and work was focused on creating peace and dialogue between Christians and Muslims for...

Butterfly Education: Does education give voice to immigrant youth?

Mary Jackson started working in the computing pool at NASA in 1951 with degrees in math and physical science. Two years later, she began to work with engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki, who later suggested a training program that would give her a promotion to be an engineer. For that, Jackson needed to take graduate level math...

Ban! For the Sake of Espionage-Based Practice Intervention on U.S. Soil

As I walked back home from Penn campus on a Tuesday morning, my mom, now a competent user of all forms social media, sent me a post titled “Breaking news! No more study for Chinese students in the States!” “I think it will just be about students in sensitive fields like Engineering. I am in...

Let’s Mourn The Local Language

“...the children will not repeat the phrases their parents speak someone has persuaded them that it is better to say everything differently so that they can be admired somewhere farther and farther away…” ~W.B. Merwin (1988), Loss of Language It seems like more and more students around the world are attaining a university degree. What a great...

A(r)tivism: statue as a form of activism

Last month, a right-wing Japanese official visiting Taiwan kicked a memorial statue of a ‘comfort woman’ in Taiwan, outraging the Taiwanese public who further demanded a hostage of the Japanese until he made a public apology. Why fuss about a kick at a bronze statue? After all, Mitsuhiko Fujii, the ultimate kicker and the representative...

Action not apologies: the long lasting legacy of residential schools in Canada

  Nearly within the same week, news of a problematic exam question, the hashtag #EveryChildMatters and photographs of Canadians in orange shirts surfaced the internet. First, a student at St. Paul Alternative Education Centre complained when they saw a question on an online Grade 11 social studies exam probing, “What were the positive effects of...