The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University is one of the world’s leading centers for interdisciplinary exploration, and Krishnan will be the Jeffrey S. and Margaret Mais Padnos Fellow during her yearlong fellowship there. 

“I’m honored to have won a Radcliffe fellowship,” she said. “In any given cohort you might find poets, playwrights, astronomers, mathematicians, historians and literary scholars all in conversation, and I’m deeply honored and excited to be part of that community.”

Krishnan, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center and the Department of English in the ������̳ of Arts & Sciences, has a DPhil in English from the University of Oxford and an M.D. from Johns Hopkins University. She said she came to Georgetown in 2020 in part because she was drawn to the university’s interdisciplinary environment. 

“Students gravitate naturally toward work that crosses disciplines,” Krishnan said. “And the faculty are welcoming of it. Many of them are leaders in polyglot thinking and approaches. …It’s part of something I value deeply about Georgetown, which is its commitment to intellectual production in service of social and communal good.”

Her work on the Hilltop spans the history of medicine, literary studies and clinical research, and her interests include diagnostic thinking and clinical reasoning, as well as the pressing problems of diagnostic disparities and the diagnostic error in patient care. Krishnan has also published widely on historical and contemporary pandemics. 

“Dr. Lakshmi Krishnan’s scholarship is both exceptional and transformative in that it contributes substantially to both of her academic fields,” said , a professor and chair of the Department of English. “The significant recognition that she has received from prestigious fellowships like that of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute is a testament to the impact of her innovations. Through this fellowship and through her outstanding scholarly research, she is highlighting the interdisciplinary academic excellence of Georgetown’s English department, Medical School and Medical Humanities Initiative in an extraordinary way.”

In her upcoming book, Krishnan hopes that readers will learn a different understanding of where clinical reasoning comes from. 

“We tend to think of diagnosis as purely scientific, but it owes as much to narrative imagination as to the scientific method,” she said. “The doctor and the detective emerged as twin figures in the 19th century, and that kinship still shapes how physicians think today.”

(Top photo of Lakshmi Krishnan by Tina Krohn)

That’s why, every week, she took time to work with Lutheran Social Services, a refugee resettlement agency in Northern Virginia. There, both in-person and online, she co-taught classes to an all-female club of Afghan refugees, covering topics from financial literacy to feminine health and English as a second language (ESL). 

“It felt natural to join initiatives dedicated to migration and ESL because I wasn’t a stranger,” said Ahmed. “As a daughter of immigrants, education holds a central role in my personal and professional aspirations. Since childhood, I’ve been raised to know that education is not simply a title one accomplishes through an institution, but, rather, an experience that requires academic, emotional, spiritual and physical toiling.”

In the spring, Ahmed was recognized alongside seven other graduating seniors in the ������̳ of Arts & Sciences with the Lena Landegger Community Service Award, celebrating and honoring their commitments and contributions to service. The award, which has recognized Hoyas for exceptional service for more than 25 years, is given in honor of Lena Landegger (H’87), the mother of George F. (F’58) and Carl (C’53).

Listening to the Call to Serve

Recipients of the award, which is given each year to twenty students across the university in memory of its eponym, embody the call, articulated by Rev. Pedro Arrupe, S.J., for alumni of Jesuit universities to be “people for others,” engaged in the struggle for justice to protect the needs of the most vulnerable. 

For Ahmed, that call was deeply personal, and reflected the personal growth that is essential to a Georgetown education. 

“I didn’t seek out these opportunities because they were service-oriented projects, but rather because they resonated with my values, interests and own past,” said Ahmed. “Having these shared experiences, such as translating for my parents during medical appointments, college applications and day-to-day life, allowed me to better connect with the communities I worked alongside.”

In addition to her work with the Lutheran Social Services, Ahmed became involved with the , or DCSP, a program of the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching & Service. There, she also taught ESL lessons to recently-arrived migrant children from the United States’ southern border. 

“My responsibilities included family outreach, leading information sessions on the Washington, DC, migration context and organizing local advocacy initiatives like distributing school supplies” said Ahmed. “Through this role, I honed my leadership and communication skills by advocating for migrant justice.” 

The through line connecting both programs was an attitude of service in collaboration and fellowship with others. 

“It can be tricky to traverse how to be in solidarity with a community, without disempowering them,” said Ahmed. “What I’ve learned is that service can not be done with the perspective that you are ‘helping’ or ‘giving a voice’ to the communities that you are working with, rather, service must be done from a place of solidarity, and by using your resources to amplify and uplift their narratives.” 

Combining the Personal and the Academic

Like Ahmed, Caroline Vail (C’24) found a second home in the DC Schools Project during her time on the Hilltop. 

“I worked with the DC Schools Project during all 4 of my years at Georgetown,” said Vail. “I was a tutor for 5 semesters, and in the spring of my junior year, I became a coordinator on our school-based team.” 

As a coordinator, Vail supported a small team of tutors as they worked with immigrant students in DC Public Schools on their English language skills. This role involved coordinating with the group’s on-site contacts at the school, communicating with parents and building community among the tutoring team. 

“The biggest lessons I learned from this work were from the relationships that I built with the tutees and their parents, which taught me the importance of working in collaboration with a community rather than simply providing a service or charity to or for a community,” said Vail. 

Vail’s interest in service-based education extended into her academic life. While double-majoring in both linguistics and Portuguese, Vail tacked on a minor in education, inquiry and justice. Her senior honors thesis in linguistics explored the language learning needs of the recently-arrived migrant population that she worked with through DCSP and sought to create a task-based curriculum for tutoring centered on those needs. 

For Vail, her passion for justice is inextricably tied to her faith. On the Hilltop, Vail was deeply involved in campus ministry, serving as a student leader with Chi Alpha, an inter-denominational Christian community. 

“Grounding my commitment to enter into the struggle of the migrant community through solidarity is a firm belief in fundamental human dignity, which encourages me to see each community member as an image-bearer of the Creator,” said Vail. “I see a faith that does justice as one way that I can honor that dignity.”

Today, Vail lives out her ethos of service working as a Student & Family Engagement Coordinator with Center for Supportive Schools, a nonprofit organization contracted by New York City Public Schools to provide support to under-resourced schools. Working at 3 high schools in the Bronx, Vail focuses on projects to increase attendance, improve school culture and climate and promote the wellbeing of the community as a whole.

“I think my faith, and specifically my commitment to honoring fundamental human dignity, was the through line between my academics, my work with DCSP and my leadership in Chi Alpha,” said Vail. “A lot of the information that I learned in the classroom about how we learn languages or about educational equity was directly applicable to my work with DCSP, and vice versa.” 

“I think that the reason that a lot of these things were intertwined was because my motivation was always to honor people and serve the community out of my belief that everyone is made in the image of God.”

Cover illustration by Bratislav Milenković.

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Graduate linguistics student Helen Dominic is examining the power that listening can have on healing that will improve health care for immigrants by utilizing narrative medical practices. Dominic, a fourth-year Ph.D. student, is performing intersectional research through the that will improve health care for immigrants by utilizing narrative medical practices.  

Listening, Learning, Linguistics

Originally from Singapore, Dominic’s interest in linguistics began at a young age. 

“A lot of my research has been shaped by my own experiences of being an immigrant,” Dominic says. “I was born in India, but my family moved to Singapore when I was two, which made me very aware of how language shapes society and how it has shaped me.”

Dominic says that being a racial minority in Singapore played a major role in her ultimate pursuit of earning a Ph.D. in linguistics and moving to a culturally diverse city like Washington, DC. 

Since she started her program, Dominic’s primary research focus has been within immigrant discourse. When she came to Georgetown, Dominic was able to find a community in the , specifically, in a branch that examines the intersection of health care and language. 

“The more I learned, the more I realized that there is so much work that needs to be done within immigrant discourse and medical care,” Dominic explains. “Currently, I’m on the pathway to writing my dissertation that will focus on interpretation  in medical settings, specifically the immigrant interpreter’s experiences.”  

When an immigrant with limited proficiency in English needs medical care, they tend to bring a family member or friend along with them who can communicate with medical staff and offer moral support. In these interactions, there are many possibilities for miscommunication. 

“At any point when three people are involved in a conversation, there are many chances for miscommunication — this is the case even when all parties speak English and the miscommunication is compounded further when there is a person who can’t speak a specific language that the other two know,” Dominic explains. “The problem with the specific triad that I’m looking at is that the patient is often the one who’s left out. As much as it is their body, their pain and their desire to be better that needs to be considered, it’s oftentimes really tough for them to communicate in the way that will make them feel comfortable.”

This problem is further complicated by potential biases held by the family member or friend who is interpreting. Since they know the individual they are representing so well, they can overlook or over-emphasize certain aspects of the individual’s problem to medical professionals. However, to the patient, their family member or friend is still valued and necessary in the interaction. This creates a complex problem with attempting to understand how to best provide care for immigrant patients with limited proficiency in English. 

Dominic’s research thus focuses on the family member involved in the interaction and how that intersects with their immigrant identity.

“I think any immigrant would say that translating for their parents is such an important part of their life growing up,” Dominic says. “Being a part of Georgetown has been a good space for me to explore this topic.”

A graduate fellow with the new Medical Humanities Initiative, which examines the intersection of medicine and the humanities, Dominic hopes that this research will continue to allow her to work with doctors to improve doctor education. 

“Intercultural communication can definitely be more strongly taught in medical education, including doctors, nurses, techs and so on,” Dominic explains. “ I would like to ultimately translate my research into materials for medical staff education, which I know will be well received here in Georgetown. The university’s medical school already has programs in place to ensure that they are not only educating their doctors, but trying to reduce burnout among students.  

“They also emphasize that doctors should not only read within their fields of science and medicine, but keep up-to-date on best quality care practices that will guarantee they are caring for the whole person,” Dominic continues.

One of the ways to provide this holistic care is referred to as narrative medicine, where doctors and medical professionals listen to the individual stories of the patients to comprehensively provide aid. This concept is even more crucial for immigrant families who are not only dealing with varying life issues but differing cultural expectations of health care.  

During her year-long fellowship, Dominic will have the chance to observe these triadic interactions, and talk to patients, doctors, and family members one-on-one. 

“What the doctors perceive of the interaction might be so different than what the patients experience and perceive, so I will be spending a lot of time listening to people’s stories and narratives and seeing how to come to a middle ground when creating and promoting these educational materials.” 

Lakshmi Krishnan, MD, Ph.D. and director of the Medical Humanities Initiative, says that “Helen’s project aligns beautifully with the mission and vision of MHI.”

“Leveraging linguistics methodologies with a keen awareness of structural and cultural competencies and motivated by her personal experiences, Helen’s work turns a much-needed critical lens upon health professional education and will impact practitioner-patient communication as well as improve immigrant health care,” Krishnan continues. “We are thrilled to support it through a Graduate Research Fellowship.” 

Life After a Linguistics Program 

After earning her Ph.D., Dominic plans to enter the healthcare research field. More specifically, she hopes to study intercultural communication and linguistics in the telehealth world. 

Dominic says that her mentors at Georgetown have been instrumental to her success. Her main advisor, Natalie Schilling, Ph.D., and professor in the linguistics department, helped Dominic think more deeply about how language can reflect and construct the institution, and how this affects policy and culture. 

Schilling, who works closely with Dominic, says that she “is a dedicated, thoughtful and uniquely collegial student and researcher.”

“Her original research promises to make invaluable contributions to the study of communicative practices in healthcare encounters and their impact on health outcomes and the overall well-being of patients and other concerned parties,” Schilling continues. “In addition, she is contributing to our sociolinguistic understandings of how people shape identities and role relations through language in both everyday and institutional interactions.”

Heidi Hamilton, professor emerita, is a pioneer in studying the intersection of language and medicine, which greatly shaped the work done by Dominic. Finally, Alexandra Johnston, assistant teaching professor and director of the , helped to guide Dominic’s thoughts on how to make her research applicable and useful to the communities she is studying. 

“I am very lucky to have three incredible women as mentors and on my committee,” says Dominic. “What I have ultimately learned from them is that it is so important to have conversations across disciplines and to share ideas. We can all be viewing the same painting at the same time, but what a scientist notices is going to be extremely different from what someone who studies literature notices. I think the better that we get at noticing things that are outside of our fields, the more effective solutions we will find that are going to solve a lot of these extremely complex and dynamic problems.”

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