OtherWise

21Horizontal Empathy

Brigitta Tadmor’s speech has the rolling r’s of someone who learned English as a second language, but she’s been speaking it daily ever since college. “The first lab I worked in was in Zurich,” she says, “and it was all English.” It was the same in Israel, where she earned her PhD in molecular biology at the Weizmann Institute and, of course, at Harvard, where she did postdoctoral work, before moving on to MIT and eventually to the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research as global head of diversity, inclusion, and health policy.

“It’s amazing how global the scientific community is,” she says. “No matter where you go, it’s just scientists speaking broken English everywhere.” Not that she hasn’t seen people cluster by language. ...