NOT unlike Tan Sri Michelle Yeoh’s Oscar-winning movie title Everything Everywhere All At Once, a solid education is about knowledge interconnectivity.
The future, said former US presidential science envoy to Malaysia Dr Rita Colwell (pic), is about sound interdisciplinary education.
Students, she said, must be well-versed in everything because the sciences, engineering, technology, medicine, arts and humanities are all interconnected in one way or another.
With a pool of intelligent young talents, Malaysia has the potential to be among the leading nations in a global quest for sustainability, she told StarEdu, adding that sustainability should not be viewed as a burden; instead, it should be looked at as the future, and as a human profit centre.
“This is a country rich in resources with a well-educated population so I think that Malaysia is very well primed for future challenges,” she said.
Colwell is an eminent scientist with a strong international reputation – her latest accolade being the prestigious Stockholm Water Prize which she won last year.
She is a former director of the US National Science Foundation and past-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
She is also a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Colwell, who has helped with preventing cholera outbreaks in countries like Yemen, is currently working on endemic prediction research, which would enable her to project and assess changes in the environment, and the likelihood of pandemics occurring.
She was in Kuala Lumpur to deliver a special lecture at UCSI University on March 9. During her lecture, she called on Malaysian scientists to “step up and speak truth to power”.
Science, she said, should be made accessible to everyone, including children.
Information is of little use unless it is widely understood, she said, adding that even cartoons could also be used to deliver important information.
“Tell the public what you do in a simple yet accurate way, as though you were teaching a class of middle schoolers.
“That was the mindset I adopted when I was made science envoy because of the overwhelming amount of information I had to convey to former US president Barack Obama,” she said, adding that to deliver impactful research, grants should go into telling the public what the research is about because advocacy is part of the effort needed to change the perception of the community.
To attract the younger generation and to prevent them from losing interest in the sciences, Cowell said it is necessary to focus on cultivating interest at the kindergarten level.“There has been too much focus on encouraging university students to be interested in the sciences. What we should do instead is to reach out to children because they are a curious lot always keen on exploring and learning new things.”
